
Rnnic . C^ 7 g 
Copjghtl^" 



COPTOIGHT DEPOSIT 



ESSAYS 



ON 



WORK AND LIFE. 



BY 

ARTHUR B. COOKE, 

PROFESSOR IN WOFFORD COLLEGE. 



Nashville, Tenn.; Dallas, Tex.: 

Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South. 

Smith & Lamar, Agents. 

1904. 



PS 1372 
'.C72 



LIBRARY of CONGRESSj 


Two Copies 


Hcceived 


FEB 4 


1905 


Oopi^ritfiu 

/copy 





Copyright, 1904, 

BY 

The Book Agents of the M. E. Church, South. 



To 
MX WIFE. 

whose love and sympathy 

have been a constant source of inspiration, 

This Little Book Is 

Affectionately 

Dedicated. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 7 

I. Our Century 1 1 

II. A Story in Stones 24 

HI. The Purpose of Work 30 

IV. The Reward of Work 43 

V. Liberty 53 

VI. Drudgery 64 

VII. The Dignity of Work 74 

VIII. Society 83 

IX. Solitude 96 

X. Play 106 

XI. Rest 123 

XII. Service 134 

XIII. The Ideal 146 

XIV. The Unconscious Attainment 156 

(5) 



Introduction. 

The wise traveler, setting out through an un- 
discovered country, will not depend for the direc- 
tion of his course upon the hazard of the way. He 
will first acquaint himself with those points which 
are accepted as fixed and unchangeable, the 
cardinal points of direction. Then, with compass 
in hand, he may safely enter the trackless wilder- 
ness, for his way is directed by those steadfast 
guides which preside alike over the traveled and 
the untraveled expanse. 

But compass and guiding stars alone are not 
sufficient to insure a happy outcome of the jour- 
ney. Preparation and provision are essential that 
the traveler may be sustained and strengthened 
upon the way. He cannot ignore the service of 
those upon whom he is turning his back. 

And even with the most careful preparation the 
end is not assured. He must keep watch over 
himself from day to day, lest he overtax his 
strength and faint before the journey is done, or 

(7) 



8 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

else tarry too long by the wayside, and so miss the 
goal at last. He will not rush toward the end of 
the journey, but will move forward carefully, his 
course marked by bivouacs of the night and by 
camps of rest. He will take time to tarry by 
springs of refreshing. He will profit by the shade 
of the wayside. He will leave his pack by the 
roadway to make pleasant excursions aside. And 
yet he will be watchful not to linger too long in 
the pleasant places. Amid the diversions of the 
way he will not lose sight of the goal toward 
which he first set out, and the delays and devia- 
tions will but minister to the attainment of that 
goal. 

Such a journey every one of us is making. The 
life which lies before us is an undiscovered coun- 
try. We are pioneers. Yet we need not be dis- 
couraged; we have only to be wise travelers. 
There are cardinal points of direction which pre- 
side infallibly over the ways of life, points fixed 
for all time and all circumstances, north stars of 
principle and truth. Once we are acquainted with 
these points, and possessed of a compass which 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

responds to them unfalteringly, we may set out 
with confidence upon the untried way. 

We may not, however, leave behind us the pro- 
vision which has been laid up in store. For every 
one of us there has been brought together with 
great pains a selection of things that will stand 
us in stead in the days to come — these things we 
cannot afford to leave behind. A great man once 
said, when he had come to a barrier across his 
own way : "I have but one lamp by which my feet 
are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I 
know of no way of judging of the future but by 
the past." 

Setting out with all preparation, we must still 
be watchful every day, lest we squander our 
strength or fritter the time away. It is not best 
to set the face steadfastly toward the far-off 
goal. Especially upon this journey is it true that 
a straight line is not the shortest way. We shall 
progress with greatest surety by resting now and 
then ; by turning aside for pleasant excursion into 
some attractive field ; by searching out the springs 
that lie in secluded dells; by tarrying- for a 



lo ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

season of recreation under the inviting shade. 
The way of the wise traveler is not an uninter- 
rupted trail ; it is marked by signs of bivouac and 
camp and excursion. And yet there is a unity 
of direction and a controlling purpose running 
through all the days. The ultimate goal must 
never be lost from sight, and all the diversions 
of the way must serve but to bring us the more 
surely to the end of the journey. 

The goal of every life must be the realization 
of its possibilities. This little book will have 
served its aim if it help to bring any traveler 
nearer to that goal. 



I. Our Century. 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, for- 
ward let us range, 

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing 
grooves of change. 

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the 
younger day : 

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of 
Cathay. — Tennyson. 

The course of human progress is marked by 
epochs. Modern history records an epoch of 
FeudaHsm, an epoch of Renaissance, an epoch 
of Reformation, an epoch of Revokition. Each 
of these epochs had a distinctive character, and 
by virtue of that character made a distinctive 
contribution to the material and the spiritual 
life of men. 

The Feudal Age was distinctly military, the 
Renaissance distinctly intellectual, the Refor- 
mation distinctly religious, the Revolution dis- 
tinctly political. The Feudal Age gave to the 
world kings and constitutions on the material 
side, and on the spiritual side it gave to men a 



12 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

deeper respect for order and authority. The 
Renaissance brought forth in the material world 
a splendid literature, and in men themselves 
it wrought largeness of vision and freedom of 
thought. The Reformation yielded in visible 
results a multitude of denominations, and in 
invisible results a broader tolerance in the hu- 
man mind. The Revolution gave to the world 
a republican form of government as its material 
fruitage, and for spiritual results it wrought in 
men the self-reliance of democracy. 

Not that these elements, material and spirit- 
ual, were brought into existence and rounded 
to completeness by the epochs out of which they 
came. There was a semblance of authority 
and government before the Feudal days. There 
was some breadth of intellectual horizon before 
the Renaissance. There were democratic ideas 
before the age of Revolution. But just as the 
world will ever be indebted to Whitney for the 
practical application of the cotton gin and 
to Fulton for the practical application of steam, 
however much was attempted before them along 
these lines, and however their inventions have 
been elaborated and improved — so the world 
must ever stand indebted to these several epochs 



OUR CENTURY. 



13 



for the successful introduction of tliese ele- 
ments into the life of the race. 

But these epochs have made their contri- 
bution, and are passed away, leaving us their 
debtors and heirs. The laws and literatures, 
the creeds and constitutions, which they 
wrought out are ours ; as are also the spiritual 
heritage of submission to authority, and 
breadth of view, and tolerance in creed, and 
self-reliance. These fields we may enrich by 
tillage ; but the great struggles which won them 
for all time, and gave them for us to occupy in 
peace, have been fought. There will be no 
more eras of Feudalism nor Renaissance nor 
Reformation nor Revolution. The epoch in 
which the men of to-day are called to cast their 
lives is as different from them in its character 
as they are different from one another. 

The young man who goes out into life 
eager for the strife may feel, as he looks back 
upon these historic years, that we are fallen 
upon a dull and uneventful age, that there 
is no great cause to which men may devote 
their lives to-day, that we must be content 
to enjoy the inheritance which has come to us. 
And, indeed, this is not an heroic age as heroic 



14 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ages usually go. There is nothing in it likely 
to provoke the great warrior or reformer or 
poet or statesman. A Luther, a Shakespeare, 
a Washington, would be out of place in these 
days of ours. 

And, after all, it may be largely the magni- 
fying mists of time that lend heroic mold to 
rrien and epochs. Perhaps those men and 
epochs, which look so large and admirable to 
our eyes, did not look so in their own day. 
There is evidence that Luther and Shakespeare 
and Washington all three looked upon their 
work as anything else than epoch-making. 
Shakespeare thought so lightly of his work that 
he did not take the trouble to collect it. If we 
may not, therefore, look for heroic causes and 
heroic men to-day, we may, nevertheless, be 
sure of this, that our epoch has as distinctive a 
character and is able to make as distinctive a 
contribution to the world as did any of the 
epochs that are gone. 

What is the element of our epoch which dis- 
tinguishes it from all others? That deter- 
mined, we shall know the means by which we 
are to make our contribution. It is not one of 
reliction nor literature nor politics; there Is 



OUR CENTURY. 15 

nothing in those elements of our epoch which 
would distinguish us from other times. The 
spirit of the Puritan and of the Cavalier is 
with us still, as is also the spirit of Washing- 
ton and of Jefferson ; and our literature is but 
the outgrowth of English letters. When we 
compare our times with those of our fore- 
fathers, what is it in which they differ most ? 

It is preeminently our industrial life that dis- 
tinguishes us. Nowhere in all history is there 
such another gap in the progress of industry 
as that which separates us from our fathers. 
Until a century ago men had moved along the 
same deliberate w^ays for a thousand years. 
They had done their work in much the same 
way from age to age. Jefferson voyaged to 
represent our nation at the court of Paris with 
hardly more advantages of travel than Colum- 
bus enjoyed when crossing the ocean three hun- 
dred years before. Washington made his pres- 
idential tours with no more amenities of the 
way than had the Roman general of old who 
set out In his chariot to cross the empire. 
Colonial trade was carried over sea by sail and 
over land by caravan, as trade was handled 
when Venice was queen of commerce. Malls 



l6 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

and messages were speeded on their way a cen- 
tury ago just as they were when David watched 
from the city walls for news of his wayward 
boy; and Washington's death was announced 
in Charleston two wxeks and more after the 
"Father of His Country" breathed his last by 
the waters of the Potomac. Overland travelers 
of fifty years ago tarried in the wayside camp 
longer than it takes now to make the trip from 
sea to sea. Our grandmothers got materials 
for dress as did the fair w^omen in those days 
when Lucretia was found at the distaff among 
her maidens. 

With all the nation-building and constitu- 
tion-framing of our fathers, their ways were 
wonderfully deliberate. Time was of small 
consideration. TJie tide of their business was 
stayed with the coming of night and of the 
seventh day. They seem, as we look back upon 
them, less akin to us than to that race of shep- 
herds upon the hills of ancient Judea, who 
measured the flow of life by centuries, moving 
serenely down the stream of time, pausing at 
each seventh day and seventh year, consecrating 
every fiftieth year a season of jubilee and 
cessation from work. 



OUR CENTURY. 17 

The story of those departed years reads Hke 
a romance, so different were they from the 
age in which we Hve. The cycle of the sabbat- 
ical year is gone forever. In its stead we have 
a rushing age that threatens to fill with its re- 
sistless tide of energy every inlet of time, and 
sweep away the quiet havens where ships of life 
were wont to turn in to fit themselves for 
further voyage. The world has had its last 
year of jubilee; it has taken its last vacation. 
Even national days of rest seem no more for 
us. Proclamations may be sent forth at the 
falling of the year, but they carry no compell- 
ing force. The great heart of the nation beats 
scarcely one throb slower on that day. As 
individuals we may slip away from our posts 
when the strain has become too great for heart 
and head, but the world moves on. The mur- 
mur of its labor comes to us in the far retreats 
to which w^e have taken refuge. 

The last hundred years have seen an unprec- 
edented change in the world of work. A cen- 
tury ago the South was a quiet land of easy- 
going people. In 1792 Whitney invented the 
cotton gin, and the little patches of white that, 
till then, had clung about the cabin door spread 



i8 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

until they covered the Southland like snow. 
Not only did that invention call new armies 
of workmen to the plow and hoe, but it de- 
manded, too, armies for mine and brickkiln, for 
furnace and factory, for railroad and ship. 
The very streams that had run in idleness were 
harnessed into the march of progress and made 
to turn a myriad spindles. The red hillsides 
were reared into factory walls at the call of 
the cotton gin, and the sleeping ore of the moun- 
tains was transformed into roaring machinery. 

The current of industry flowed sluggishly 
through the plains of time, till George Stephen- 
son gave to the world the self-moving engine 
in 1825. That invention revolutionized the 
industrial world and raised labor to the ;/th 
degree. It created fields of work for millions 
of men. 

The iron horse and the electric flash are but 
symbols of the spirit of our epoch. Time has 
risen in value. Sun-dials and hour-glasses have 
long since given place to stop watches. We 
divide the seconds, and venture fortunes In a 
ship to break the record by thirty minutes. 
The boast of Puck that he would ''put a girdle 
round about the earth in forty minutes" has 



OUR CENTURY. 19 

come to be a matter of fact in this century of 
ocean cables. The fancy of Jules Verne con- 
ceived a journey round the globe in eighty 
days. The Siberian railway will make it pos- 
sible in thirty-three. The world is at our very 
doors. We review its acts of yesterday at our 
breakfast table, and go out to do business with 
it across a thousand miles of land and sea as 
calmly as our fathers went out to deal with 
their next-door neighbors. We live more in 
our three score years and ten of busy life than 
did the sluggish Methuselahs in their thousand 
years of dreaming beside their tents, for *'we 
live in deeds, not years." 

Industry has been transformed within the 
past century. Great mills have taken the place 
of the spinning wheel and loom that used to 
grace the shed room of grandfather's home. 
Far-reaching and complex systems of railroad 
have superseded the plodding caravan. Great 
cities stand where quiet villages once stood. 
Work is no longer individual, i;or the worker 
independent. We are bound together by elec- 
tric wires and bars of steel. There is a sym- 
pathetic dependence of labor throughout the 
land. The old loom might stop without cans- 



20 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ing derangement of the community; but the 
stopping of the cotton mill means the standstill 
of a million dollars and the idleness of a thou- 
sand workmen. The wagoner of other days 
might pitch his camp where night overtook 
him, and strike tent with the rising sun, serene- 
ly indifferent to the world at large; but the loco- 
motive engineer cannot do so with his iron 
horse, for he is a vital part of a great system 
that stretches beyond the sunset, the Interests 
of which are too urgent to take cognizance of 
day and night. 

Such consuming intensity in the field of labor 
the w^orld has never known before. The days 
have proven too short for the demands of in- 
dustry, and the nights have been turned into 
day. The panting locomotive knows no night. 
The sleepless Cyclopean eye flashes through the 
darkness from city to city, and, as it rushes 
over the land, the red eyes of lighted factories 
blink at it from the v/ayside to say that there 
too the midnight toil is going on ; while anon 
there flashes up on the black horizon the lurid 
glare of some furnace working through the 
night. Bound together by those throbbing 
arteries of work are the great, sleepless cities, 



OUR CENTURY. 2i 

on whose streets the flood tide of morning over- 
takes the ebb tide of evening; for all night there 
goes up a murmur from the city, as it were 
the panting of some huge creature after the 
exertions of the day. Even the highways 
of the deep, but just now uncharted, are lit- 
erally lighted by the signal stars of ''ships 
that pass in the night and speak each other in 
passing." 

This is preeminently an industrial age. We 
are to cast our lives into an epoch of Common 
Work. And if this epoch has not the striking 
characteristics of some that are gone, it is never- 
theless the greatest that has been opened to 
men, an age for which all others were a prepara- 
tion. Turmoil and strife and upheaval, battle 
with pen or sword, may be marks of growth, 
but they are not marks of maturity. The age 
of struggle prepares for the age of peace. 
They are both essential, but the latter age is 
the period- of fruition. It is as If a man had 
gone out and conquered the wilderness and 
subdued the savage, and then turned back to 
spend his days in the peaceful cultivation of his 
fields. The end of that man did not come 
with the end of thrilling struggle. No more 



22 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

do the turbulent ages of the past close up the 
period of our progress. 

This is not an heroic age in the sense that it 
is summed up in the persons of one or two 
great characters, but it is not lacking in heroic 
element. It demands the equalities of patience 
and judgment and action and sacrifice in every 
man who would take part in it. Every man 
may be a hero of this new age. And common 
work is the means by which we are to win 
these heroic qualities. We are to make our 
contribution to the world through the channel 
of plain industry. Whatever the man of to- 
day contributes to posterity and the life of the 
race must be contributed chiefly at his place of 
business. We are not called to fight for great 
ends and principles; we are called to work for 
them. 

The contribution of our time, as of all other 
times, will be twofold. There will be a con- 
tribution to the material, and a contribution to 
the spiritual, life. To see what the material 
contribution will be, we have only to look about 
us. It will be in terms of manufacture and 
invention, in world-wide systems of trade, in 
universal commerce, in the elevation of labor to 



OUR CENTURY. 23 

a place of respect among men. But what will 
be the spiritual contribution of this age of in- 
dustry to the life of man ? TJiis is a vital ques- 
tion, for in no other age has there been such 
danger that the spiritual contribution would be 
lost from sight in exaggeration of the material. 
It is In the hope that the men who are casting 
their lives into this strenuous age of work may 
be persuaded to consider more carefully the 
spiritual side of labor, that the following pages 
are given so largely to the unseen influences of 
work. 



II. A Story in Stones. 

Man is a Tool-using animal ; nowhere do we 
find him without Tools. — Carlyle. 

In the Ethnological Museum of Berlin is a 
collection of curious stones. To the casual eye 
they are not different from any collection that 
might be gathered from hillside or river. But 
they are more significant than the scattered 
fragments of nature's workshop. They were 
not quarried by the fingers of the frost. They 
are the result of purposeful force. 

These stones are the tools and weapons which 
our forefathers broke out of the living rock 
and shaped by the wayside to serve their simple 
need. Gathered now from hill and valley where 
the rough hands let them fall, they are no 
longer merely stones, but history preserved in 
stone. For each one of them, as It lay upon the 
hillside, marked as surely the passing of a man 
that way as did the footprint on Robinson 
Crusoe's Island shore. Every one of them rep- 
resents work; and work, however crude, is an 
(H) 



A STORY IN STONES. 25 

unfailing mark of man. It has never been sug- 
gested that those stones might be the handi- 
work of some other creature that was wont 
to express its thought in material shape, so 
deep is the conviction that man is the only tool- 
using animal, the only worker, that ever In- 
habited the earth. 

These stones represent what is known as 
the Rough Stone Age, the earliest known age 
of man. They form the first chapter of the 
story of our race. Short and simple is this 
earliest chapter as it has come down to us 
through the mute tradition of the earth. There 
is no preface or introduction; no account of 
whence came that life or how It fared or what 
Its circumstance; no record of the joys and 
sorrows, the hopes and disappointments, the 
victories and defeats that must have entered 
into that life. Only a broken stone here and 
there by the wayside, a potsherd, a mound of 
earth. Only a solitary Stonehenge standing up 
out of those ages of oblivion to witness a long 
past life, as the great trees of California stand 
the lingering survivors of a burled age of 
prodigal vitality. 

How gladly we would restore the flesh to 



26 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

those dry bones ! We dig and delve to throw 
Hght upon the mist-veiled centuries. We treas- 
ure every vestige that gives coloring to the 
picture — every fragment of pottery, every in- 
scription, every bit of wood or earth or stone or 
metal that bears the mark of man's hand. And 
we try with the aid of imagination to recon- 
struct the past out of these vestiges. We can 
hardly hope ever to know the full story of those 
buried ages. But what we do know suffices for 
the fixing of one great fact, the chief fact per- 
haps which it was intended we should know 
about them : through all the ages men have been 
expressing themselves in works of their hands. 
Nowhere in all the record do we find man other 
than a worker. 

The existence of other creatures upon the 
earth has been established by their remains. 
A bone, a footprint, a fossil in the stone, are 
the only evidences that these creatures walked 
the earth or winged the air in the long-lost ages. 
The body of the mammoth caught and kept in 
the ice fields of Siberia, the bones of the masto- 
don embedded in the plains of America, are the 
only evidence we have that the earth was once 
trodden by herds of monster creatures. But 



A STORY IN STONES. 27 

the early existence of man upon the globe is 
established only by the works of his hand. 
"That the mammoth was contemporary with 
prehistoric man is shown by the discovery of 
a drawing of the animal scratched on a piece of 
its own ivory found in a cave in France." 
Such has always been the report of searchers; 
the traces of man have been the traces of his 
hand. In vain has science searched for other 
evidence. In vain has she looked for the fossil 
of the missing link, the record of man in the 
book of geology. The fact still stands that 
the story of man consists not in "footprints on 
the sands of time" but in hand prints on the 
rocks of ages. The story is an autobiography, 
a story written by his own hand. 

It is recorded, too, in the Book of Beginnings 
that the first law laid upon man was one of 
labor: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou 
eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." 
There is no exception there, no condition of 
release, no time limit; but for every man of 
every time the law is given, and it is binding 
to the grave. As if to emphasize the perma- 
nency of the decree, it has been reaffirmed 
down the ages: "Six days shalt thou labor;" 



28 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it 
with thy might." 

Labor is coeval with man. Its manifesta- 
tion has varied in intensity with time and place, 
but its principle has been unchanged. The 
multiform labor of our epoch of Common Work 
is only the flowering of a stock the roots of 
which run to the depths of humanity's life. 

Work cannot be, then, an accident in the lives 
of men. It must be essential in some way to 
man as man. Why must we work? The law 
for the beast is : Thou shalt eat — a natural law, 
essential to the preservation of animal life. 
The law for man is : 'Tn the sweat of thy face 
shalt thou eat" — the added law of labor. Is 
this added law too a natural one, essential to 
the preservation of a life in man which the 
beast does not possess? That question may 
well give us pause whose lives have fallen upon 
a century of work. We may well turn from 
the material side now and then, and ask our- 
selves : What is the connection between me and 
my work? The all-absorbing business of to- 
day, and our intense desire for visible results, 
may distract our attention from the effect which 
this doing and getting produces upon ourselves, 



A STORY IN STONES. 



-9 



and cause us thereby to miss the true propor- 
tion between the seen and the unseen issues of 
our work. 

As yet this century is in the hands of the 
worker to do with it as he will, but it will 
finally pass to be weighed by the deliberate 
judgment of posterity. And in those scales the 
issues will be accurately measured. 

Not on the vulgar mass 
Called "work" must sentence pass — 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 
O'er which, from level stand, 
The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a 
trice : 

But all, the world's cold thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account; 
All instincts immature, 
All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the 
man's amount. 



III. The Purpose of Work. 

Work out your own salvation. — Paul the Apostle. 

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
Not God's and not the beasts' : God is, they are, 
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. — Brozvning. 

It has been said that the difference between 
man and brute is a thumb — that is, the abihty 
to do work. Such an estimate would assign 
the highest creative powder to work, making it 
the source of intellectual and moral being. It 
would make man a self-evolved prodigy. Hu- 
manity has never been willing to grant itself 
so altogether self-made. 

But it may safely be said that work, taken 
in all its bearings, is the most potent element 
in life. It is the base, and upon it all other ele- 
ments depend for their action. It is the one 
means given to man for the realization of him- 
self. It is a lever in his hands to lift him up. 
It is the great character-builder. In a very 
real and practical sense eveiy man must work 
out his own salvation. 

(30) 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 31 

If work is such an essential element of life, 
it must surely be a misconception to look upon 
it as a curse or a burden. It plays too impor- 
tant a part in man's life to justify the belief 
that it came into that life through the accident 
of disobedience, and was laid upon man as a 
punishment. The Book does not teach that 
doctrine. It does not tell us that man went 
forth from the garden of innocence under a 
curse in that dim morning of the world. The 
ground was cursed with thorns and thistles for 
his sake. 

Whatever else the wonderful story of the 
forbidden fruit and the fall may mean, it does 
mean that man with his awakened moral sense 
could not partake in idleness of the fruits of the 
tree of life. Sent forth from the presence of 
the tree, and appointed to till the ground for 
his bread, he found in battle with the thorns 
and thistles, in the sweat of his face, his only 
way to the fruits of the real tree of life. 

However far into the past critics may rele- 
gate that event, and however symbolic they may 
claim it to be, this revelation remains : that the 
moral nature, ''to know good and evil," and 
vvork came Into man's life together. Work is 



32 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE, 

as essential to our moral health as the results 
of work are to our physical health. Noble 
character was never fostered by idleness. On 
the other hand, faithful work in any sphere 
will always have an ennobling effect upon the 
workman. Though our tasks may sometimes 
be unwelcome, we may be sure that it is our- 
selves, and not the work, that make the burden. 
The pack saddle is a burden to the horse, under 
which he suffers; the hump is a vital part of 
the dromedary, from which he draws strength 
for the journey. Work was not arbitrarily laid 
upon us. It is a vital part of life. 

Tihat a man shall pay a tax upon his property 
is an arbitrary law. It is determined by cir- 
cumstances. Its reason lies outside the man. 
It may be changed or abolished without af- 
fecting him. The penalty for its violation may 
be stayed. It is a requirement of the State and 
not of his nature. Not so with the -law, Six 
days shalt thou labor. Its operation cannot be 
suspended. It cannot be annulled. The penalty 
for Its violation cannot be stayed. It is a nat- 
ural law of human life, and, like all natural 
laws, carries Its penalty with It. The penalty 
for fasting Is not Imprisonment; It is starva- 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 33 

tion. The penalty for touching fire is not a 
fine; it is pain. There is no penalty affixed to 
jumping from a precipice: gravitation metes 
out its own punishment. The violation of a 
natural law is inevitably followed by punish- 
ment. Such a law knows no time nor place nor 
person. It abides in the very nature of things. 
The law of gravitation operated upon Abraham 
just as it operates upon us. The law of labor 
is as valid to-day as it was on Sinai; for the 
writing on stone was but the utterance of an 
older statute written in the nature of man. No 
powxr can intercept the influence of our work 
upon us. Work or failure to work brings in- 
evitable consequences. 

Indolence is accompanied by degeneration. 
It Is a law^ of life that the failure to use an 
organ means the loss of that organ. And that 
law is valid from the lowest to the highest 
forms of life. The dodder plant springs from 
the ground with organism like other plants. 
But no sooner does It lay hold of the clover 
and make It do the work of changing soil to 
sap than It loses Its own root and becomes a 
parasite. There Is an ant called the slave- 
maker. Once it is believed to have lived as 

3 



34 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

Other ants do, but a propensity for making 
others do its work has changed it into a slave- 
holder. It ceased work, and has become so 
dependent upon its slaves that without them it 
will actually starve to death in the midst of 
plenty. It has lost the powers it would not use. 

In higher spheres of life the presence of the 
serf has often wrought ruin to the master 
through the atrophy of his faculties. While 
the citizens of Greece and Rome worked they 
were strong. When they gave over their work 
to helots and slaves, they became effete. In- 
dolence is more vitiating than ignorance, for it 
is more incompatible with life. It is decreed 
that the first state of every individual and of 
every people shall be one of ignorance, for it 
may be overcome by work. But there is no 
compensation that can balance the effect of in- 
dolence. The habitual idler will sink to the 
lowest depth. Men could not cease to work 
and continue to be men. 

All the records of the past testify to the con- 
stancy with which effort and progress have 
gone hand In hand among the nations. Those 
peoples who have persistently put forth effort 
have not only wrought the largest material 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 35 

results; they have also come to be the most 
significant peoples. 

The Venus of Milo and the Alaskan totem 
pole are not merely two specimens of work: 
they are two measures of life. The Greek work 
stands not only for high attainment in art, but 
just as surely for high attainment in life. The 
nobility expressed in the statue was not 
wrought into the stone by some happy chance 
of the sculptor's chisel. Distinctive work is 
never the result of chance ; before the workman 
can express noble qualities in his work, he 
must in some measure realize those qualities 
in himself. That for which the Greek statue 
stands had to be wrought into the life of the 
people before it could be chiseled in stone. Real 
work Is always characteristic of the life out 
of which it came. The one reflects the other 
inevitably. It has been said that, if ever}- 
other vestige of Greek life were lost, that life 
could be reconstructed in its essential features 
from the frieze of the Parthenon. The Venus 
of Milo stands to-day an Irrefutable witness 
to the beauty and nobility of a life that Is van- 
ished. It Is only by virtue of this law of re- 
ciprocal Influence that we can learn anything- 



36 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

about the peoples of the past or predict any- 
thing of those to come. 

But the quahties revealed to us through the 
work of the Greeks were not attained by that 
people at a stroke. They w^ere won at the cost 
of centuries of toil, through generations of 
striving after high ideals. How many pieces of 
imperfect work mark the way that leads to 
the masterpiece ! Behind Phidias there stretches 
a long line of unknown but faithful workers. 
We should no more expect a Venus of Milo out 
of Alaskan life of to-day than we should ex- 
pect to gather figs of thistles. A work of 
beauty or of power cannot come out of a sordid 
and indolent life. If a man would bring forth 
the best fruits, he must be willing to give time 
to the culture of the tree of life itself; for in 
everything it is only the good tree that bears 
good fruit. Labor is the price of attainment. 

Moreover the finest expressions of life do 
not come directly. The rose stock must grow 
for months, changing the soil to thorn and 
fiber and foliage before it can change that 
soil into the beauty of a rose. History shows 
this to be true of the life of men. They have 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 37 

always won through common work the power 
which was afterwards to blossom forth in the 
forms of loveliness that we call art. The 
Greeks were not first a people of arts. They 
conquered the land with spear and plowshare 
before they began to cultivate the fields of 
sculpture and poesy. The Hebrews were herds- 
men and tillers of the soil for ages before 
David and Solomon. The qualities that made 
their splendid history were won in other fields. 
The endurance of the Maccabees savors of 
making bricks without straw. The Romans 
were horny-handed sons of toil for centuries 
before they came to be world conquerors. 
Cincinnatus was called from the plow to the 
helm of state, and Lucretia was found by her 
unexpected visitors at the distaff wnth her 
maidens. Our own ancestors laid the founda- 
tion of Anglo-Saxon attainment with yeoman 
brawn, conquering sea and soil by sturdy 
might. The Drakes and Nelsons, the Shakes- 
peares and Miltons, of later days were made 
possible by these unfamed, unlettered men who 
dared the dangers of the sea and made an in- 
hospitable land their home. 

The same mystery which weaves together the 



38 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

warp of the physical and the woof of the spirit- 
ual seems to have made attainment in the 
higher spheres of work dependent upon accom- 
plishment in the lowxr spheres. Common work 
is an apprenticeship which individuals and na- 
tions alike must serve if they would realize 
their highest possibilities. We cannot see how 
service at the plow and hoe and the common 
trades could flower into statesmanship and 
science and art. Nor can we see how the branch 
brings forth the blossom and the mellow fruit. 
But the one is just as sure as the other. We 
know that a Shakespeare among the Zulus is as 
impossible as the blossom without root. It is 
only by continued toil that those qualities are 
wrought into life which are afterwards to find 
expression in finer forms of work. 

It has been charged against America that her 
people are lacking in a certain culture which 
marks the life of older countries, that they have 
produced no art nor literature, that they are 
essentially a commercial people. The charge 
is in a measure true. We are a business peo- 
ple. We get more done in the world of work 
than any other people. And we have not pro- 
duced so permanent a literature and art as have 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 39 

some of our sister nations. But there is no 
surer nor straighter way to the attainment of 
what as yet we lack than the road we are pur- 
suing. If the people of America will continue 
with uprightness and purity of purpose their 
ways of common work, we may confidently 
predict for the nation a future rich in expres- 
sion of the finest elements of life. Venice was 
mistress of commerce before she became the 
home of art. Florence was a mart of trade be- 
fore she became the mother of Dante and 
Donatello. No people can work uprightly in 
any field without rising unconsciously to higher 
things. 

But energy alone is not a guaranty of ulti- 
mate success. Material results may be an in- 
dex of a people's thrift, but they are not an 
unfailing sign of national health and welfare. 
The family of Pharaohs under whom the 
Hebrews served wrought so greatly in their 
day that they won the name of the Builders. 
But for all their work, they did not give 
strength to Egyptian life, for with the next 
dynasty began the decline of Egypt's empire. 
Work done through the oppression or the cor- 
ruption of a people is accomplished at too great 



40 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

a cost, for it is done at the sacrifice of a nation's 
power. The strength of a people is not so 
surely measured by their industries as by their 
devotion to fidelity and uprightness in what- 
ever work they perform. 

We may build our great cities, our railroads, 
our factories and ships to-day, and the work 
itself will stand the test of time; but if we 
build them at the cost of corrupted manhood, 
if the work is accomplished in selfishness and 
decej^tion and injustice, there will come a 
generation in our country whose right hand 
shall have lost its cunning. Corruption of the 
man will inevitably manifest itself in corrup- 
tion of the work. 

With all our material progress to-day, are 
not there already signs of disease in our national 
life? Whenever the workman is induced by 
imposed conditions to bend from his upright- 
ness of character in the running of a train or 
the turning out of a bar of Iron or ton of coal 
or bolt of cloth, he and the nation are worse 
for that day's work, however well the work 
itself Is done. Every employer who sets his 
employees an example of dishonesty, or by re- 
strictions tempts them to scamp their work, 



THE PURPOSE OF WORK. 



41 



is sowing the seeds of disease in a nation's life. 
Is not the multitude of unproclaimed imita- 
tions and adulterations that have found a place 
on our market enough to make us pause ? 

We who take part in this epoch of Common 
Work have before us perhaps the greatest op- 
portunity and responsibility that were ever 
presented to one generation. 'The sun never 
shone upon a race of civilized men," said the 
author of "The Workers," "whose responsi- 
bilities were greater and whose problems were 
more charged with the welfare of mankind, 
among whom energy and thrift and persever- 
ance and ability were surer of their just re- 
wards, and where there were so many and such 
various chances of successful and honorable 
career." It is our privilege to contribute to 
the world a stamp of common manhood such 
as, for sturdiness and fidelity and uprightness, 
has never yet been found among the masses of 
humanity. And every man who sets his hand 
to work In this great land of ours has the 
privilege of contributing his share of this gift 
to posterity. It devolves upon this new cen- 
tury, with Its tremendous accomplishment in 
material things, to work Into the great multl- 



43 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

tude of men the high quahties of true manhood. 
The spiritual contribution of the new epoch 
must be in unadorned character. But whether 
that contribution will be made depends upon 
the spirit in which we do our work. 



IV. The Reward of Work. 

Man is the spirit he worked in : not what he 
did, but what he became. — Carlyle. 

Work in every hour, paid or unpaid ; see only 
that thou work, and thou canst not escape the re- 
ward : whether thy work be fine or coarse, plant- 
ing corn or writing epics, so only it be honest 
work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn 
a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: 
no matter how often defeated, you are born to 
victory. The reward of a thing well done is to 
have done it. — Emerson. 

The reward of work is Invisible. When we 
were children at school the master used to 
set us copies on our slates. And when the task 
was done, he rubbed out all our work and set 
us another copy to do. A like fate befell what- 
ever we did in those first schooldays. The 
problems solved were thrown away. The exer- 
cises were torn up. The lessons gotten were 
forgotten. We saw only the visible results; 
the teacher saw growing carefulness and perse- 
verance and ambition in his pupils, and knew 
that the service of the task was done. It was 

(43) 



44 



ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 



only the doing of these things that was worth 
while, for in it there came to us unconsciously 
a permanent and great accomplishment. 
School days are not for the sake of the task, 
but for the sake of the pupil. 

And these days are the anteroom to life, 
with only a door between. The principles and 
processes of school continue through all our 
days. The world is a great schoolroom. The 
children there are older and the work is more 
serious, but the plan of instruction and the aim 
of the work are the same, and they have 
remained unchanged from the beginning. 
Through the ages classes of solemn-faced chil- 
dren have been taking their places in the great 
schoolroom to wTite their copies and solve their 
problems as best they could. But no sooner 
has the task been completed than the Master's 
hand has rubbed it out. Where Is the work of 
those famous classes from Egypt and Athens 
and Rome, or of the countless less distinguished 
but faithful classes that have passed through 
the great schoolroom? No trace of it rem.ains, 
except here and there a fragment of sum or 
sentence, a piece of tattered copy or a broken 
slate inscribed, wdiich chance has left hidden 



THE REWARD OF WORK. 45 

in some niche or covered in some unswept cor- 
ner. Curious members of our class to-day have 
brought them to Hght, these fragments of 
scroU and potsherd and carved stone — just 
enough to show that those who passed before 
had their tasks and met them well or ill. All 
else is gone. The mystic lore of Egypt has 
vanished. The sculpture of the Greeks is 
crumbled back to earth, and their paintings 
have faded away. Rome's material greatness 
is buried in the ruins of the Palatine and the 
wreck of the Appian Way. The art and archi- 
tecture of the past are but weather-beaten heaps 
of stone. And the more delicate handiwork 
that must have been woven in filigree about 
that ancient life has long since been swept 
away. The crumbling pyramids keep watch 
over Egypt's grave, and the Palatine Hill marks 
the resting place of Caesar's splendor. The fin- 
ger of time has touched it all, its service ended. 
Chronos swallows up his children as soon as 
they are brought to birth. 

But the work of those centuries was not in 
vain, any more than the work of our school 
days is futile because our copy books are lost. 
The world never works in vain. It never loses 



46 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

what it has won. The reward of work is in- 
visible, and that reward is permanent. The 
visible results of work are only for those who 
produce them. Through the crumbling monu- 
ments of time there has come down to us a 
sure inheritance, swelled by every man that has 
put forth his hand to honest work in the long 
line of ancestry. And every child of to-day is 
veritably "the heir of all the ages in the fore- 
most files of time." Our lives are deeper and 
stronger and our possibilities are greater be- 
cause every faithful worker of the ages won 
through the performance of his task something 
permanent, both for himself and for the race. 

The reward of work is in the effort, not the 
accomplishment. In the dawn of history a 
voice came to a son of the East saying, "Get 
thee up from thy people and thy father's house, 
and go into a land that I will show thee ;" and, 
obedient to the voice, Abraham rose from 
among his people and set his face toward the 
West. The followers of that first pioneer have 
held their course unflinching toward the setting 
sun. Through the land of Greek and Roman 
and the Western world the spirit of advance has 
striven till it has returned to the East by way 



THE REWARD OF WORK. 47 

of the West, and the children of progress stand 
face to face to-day with the children of those 
whom Abraham left behind. The flood of time 
has swept back in the wake of that advance, 
and swallowed up from the way well-nigh 
every vestige of accomplishment. When we 
compare the child of the East and the child of 
the West as they meet in the Orient to-day, 
the measure of their difference is not in what 
they have but in what they are. The superi- 
ority of the Western life is an immaterial one, 
a superiority in thought and imagination and 
energy and ideal. And this superiority is the 
accumulated inheritance of centuries of strug- 
gle. 

The greatest inheritance that can come to 
child or people is an inheritance of energy and 
high purpose. These given, all else is assured ; 
these lacking, all else is vain. The pages of 
history present no more pathetic scene than 
Rome of the Decline sitting without energy or 
ideal in the midst of a vast empire which had 
been carved out and handed down to her. 
Helpless in her spiritual poverty and powerless 
to maintain her inheritance, she finally flung 
over her inmost walls the last treasures of her 



48 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ancient art in vain endeavor to stay the tide of 
her invaders. Unable to produce, she was also 
unable to preserve. 

But this picture reduced may be seen in the 
child of to-day who, with his inheritance of 
material wealth, has failed of that spiritual in- 
heritance which alone can make of the material 
a power, and who finally casts away the last 
treasures of his fathers in helpless extremity. 
It means infinitely more to give the power to 
strive than to bequeath material wealth, to 
give incentive than to present the prize. Less- 
ing, the great reformer of Germany, said : "If 
the Good Father were to hold in his right hand 
Truth, and in his left the earnest striving after 
Truth, though with the necessity of forever 
erring ; and should say to me, Choose ! I should 
humbly bow to the left hand and say : Father, 
give." 

This Heaven's evangel be, 

Gospel God-given — 
They fail, and they alone, 

Who have not striven. 

Work brings a sure reward, though it may 
result in apparent failure. Every tool works 
at both ends. At one end is the visible, at the 



THE REWARD OF WORK. 49 

Other the invisible, result. The hoe cultivates 
a crop of cotton and a crop of character. The 
foundry molds both metal and men. The col- 
lege boy gets lessons and life. Work is always 
double. On one side it is material, on the other 
immaterial. On one side it is transient, on the 
other permanent. Our daily tasks, however 
insignificant they may seem on the one side, 
assume the noblest proportions when viewed 
from the other. Our modest work and the 
hero's sacrifice are one in the unseen realm — 
duty. Our two mites and our friend's great 
gift are the same on the other side — love. 
Our self-control when the day goes wrong and 
the apostle's endurance bear the same fruit of 
the spirit — patience. The laborers of the first 
hour and those of the eleventh receive the same 
recompense, for the measure of the unseen 
world is in kind, not quantity. And the results 
in the unseen world are sure, whatever be those 
in the seen. 

And work is the only means by which these 
results in the unseen world can be secured. 
We cannot get them by dreaming or waiting. 
We must work them into ourselves or miss 
them forever. "Work," said Henry Drum- 
4 



50 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

mond, "is an incarnation of the unseen. In 
this loom man's soul is made. There is a sub- 
tle machinery behind it all, working while he 
is working, making or unmaking the unseen in 
him. Integrity, thoroughness, honesty, accu- 
racy, conscientiousness, faithfulness, patience — 
these unseen things which complete a soul are 
woven into it in work. Apart from work, these 
things are not." 

Work is the medium through which charac- 
ter passes. We cannot be gentle or unselfish 
except through work, for these qualities are 
cultivated only in the doing of something for 
another. The highest qualities come to us 
through the same medium. Faith comes to- 
day through the building of ships and the 
making of journeys, as it did in the days of 
Noah and Abraham. Love requires the same 
conditions that it did when the Master an- 
swered Peter's asseveration with, 'Teed my 
sheep." 

We never strike a blow at any task but It 
returns upon us like a boomerang. Every con- 
scious act makes a record in our lives that is 
not measured by the visible results of the act, 
but by the intent and purpose which we put 



THE REWARD OF WORK. c^i 

into it. Whatever our efforts may be accom- 
plishing in the eyes of the world, in us they are 
accomplishing the permanent results of honesty 
or dishonesty, faithfulness or unfaithfulness, 
selfishness or unselfishness, passion or patience. 
We are constantly building in the unseen. A 
man is cut off in the midst of his work, and 
men say. What a pity he could not finish it! 
The pity is not that the work was left unfin- 
ished—another can finish that— but that the 
man was left unfinished, which is beyond all 
help. 

In a room where the writer used to spend the 
morning and evening hours of childhood hung 
a motto worked by a mother's hand — Labor 
Has Sure Reward. The child looked upon the 
motto superficially, and it seemed to be contra- 
dicted by what he saw about him. He saw the 
farmers face failure of the harvest after a sum- 
mer's toil. He saw men miss the aim of their 
efforts. He saw hope disappointed and promise 
fail. Every day brought unrewarded labor. 
But afterwards he saw how these men had 
come out of their disappointments and failures 
stronger in endurance and courage and patience 
and faith. The truth of the motto was proved. 



52 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

Labor has its sure reward. Let us only look in 
the right place, and we shall certainly find it. 

As participants in an epoch of work it will 
be well for us to remember that there are two 
kinds of reward in work, a seen and an unseen, 
a transient and a permanent. They are not 
always compatible. Often in the great days 
that lie out before us we shall be called upon to 
make our choice between the two. We may 
receive the reward we covet most. If we are 
willing to sacrifice the inner reward for the 
outer — to build up fortune at the expense of 
character, to get gain by sharp practice — we 
may for a season win a measure of success. 
If we are walling to sacrifice material gain 
rather than compromise character, we may 
count upon a sure reward in terms of charac- 
ter. It may be said of men to-day as was said 
of old, Verily they have their reward. 

And, finally, whatever contribution we shall 
make to the world as a nation will be measured 
not only in visible terms of railroads and mines 
and factories but also in invisible terms of 
character. 



V. Liberty. 

Liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-con- 
trol, of self-mastery, and a thoughtful care for 
righteous dealings. — Woodrow Wilson. 

Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be 
and do the beat that is possible for him. — Phillips 
Brooks. 

License is not liberty. They are as far 
apart as the unbridled passion of the savage 
and the self-mastery of the cultured man. The 
one is abandonment. The other is restraint. 
When the French Revolutionists, under the 
name of liberty, gave themselves up to the 
excesses of the Reign of Terror, they furnished 
one of the greatest misnomers of history. 
They did not get liberty, but only a change of 
masters. They threw off the tyranny of kings 
to accept that of their prejudice and passions. 
And under the one bondage they were as far 
from liberty as under the other, for hatred and 
ignorance and viciousness bar the way to the 
liberty of manhood as surely as do the edicts of 
oppressive kings. 

(53) 



54 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

True liberty does not come by revolt and 
revolution, however essential these may some- 
times be to i^repare the way. It does not come 
through force of arms nor as a gift bestowed. 
Emancipation proclamations do not assure it, 
nor does it always come hand in hand with the 
gift of ballot and the crown of citizenship. 
The way to it is not closed by prison bars. 
These things are from without. Liberty is 
from within. It is not freedom from some- 
thing, but into something. It is positive, not 
negative ; active, not passive. It comes not with 
the loosing of shackles, but with the getting of 
strength. 

It is this high ideal of liberty, the proper 
aim and end of all freedom, which the great 
preacher had before him when he said : ^'Liberty 
is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do 
the best that is possible for him." This liberty 
comes to a man only through the realization 
of himself in the highest possibilities of his 
nature. It is not won by stroke of sword or 
pen. It comes slowly and silently, without the 
sound of falling fetters. It is ''the privilege 
of maturity," the ripened fruit of years, the 
result of unremitted struggle. It is the end 



LIBERTY. 55 

toward which every act should be directed, the 
fulfilhng of ourselves. All else is accessory to 
this end — manumission, citizenship, posses- 
sions, knowledge. "Ye shall know the truth, 
and the truth shall make you free." Freedom 
is life's consummation. Perfect liberty is per- 
fect life. 

Real liberty does not depend upon outer cir- 
cumstance. Epictetus was a slave according 
to the Roman law, but he was free in all that 
makes for manhood. That could not be bound 
by law. *'Me in chains?" said the frail old 
man. "You may fetter my leg, but my will not 
even Zeus himself can overpower." The au- 
thor of the Epistles to Timothy lying bound in 
the dungeon of the Mamertine prison was freer 
than the Caesar who lorded it over Rome ; for 
the fetters of the one were iron bands, which 
a stroke of the chisel could break; but the fet- 
ters of the other were bonds of habit forged 
about his soul. 

The difference between men is not in position. 
Two men may work together, with the same 
opportunities, the same circumstances ; and yet 
the one be free and the other bond. The one 
man will see in the flowers at his feet a world 



56 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

of beauty and in the sky overhead a world of 
splendor. Nature will appeal to him with a 
thousand voices. And every man who passes 
by the way will be to him a member of the 
great human brotherhood. His world is as 
broad as humanity, as high as the heavens, as 
deep as the earth. Thought and imagination 
have given him all ages and places for habita- 
tion. Time and space are his dominion. The 
other man is bound to the hillside which he 
tills, if not as literally as the serf, yet as really — 
bound by the fetters of his incompleteness. He 
knows nothing of the worlds the liberty of 
which his neighbor enjoys. For him they do 
not exist. He sees nothing of the world about 
him, neither its wonders nof its beauties : 

A primrose by a river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him. 

There is no feeling of brotherhood which 
opens the world of humanity to him. The 
powers of admiration and thought and imagi- 
nation and sympathy and reverence are bound 
in that man. He has missed the larger liberty 
which the possession of those powers brings. 
His interest is exhausted in the petty concerns 



LIBERTY. 57 

of his routine work. His life is bounded by 
the day and the hillside. 

One of these men is free, not by virtue of 
any citizenship but because he has realized 
himself; the other is bound, because he has 
not. And no outer circumstance can materially 
affect the freedom of the one or the bondage of 
the other. The bondman would be bond, were 
he to wear a crown. The plant is free when it 
breaks from the clod and sends out its branches 
and puts forth its leaves and fulfills its nature. 
We are free when we put forth our branches 
of life and unfold our powers and fulfill our- 
selves. 

Seek'st thou the Highest, the Greatest? The 

flower can show thee the way. 
What it unwittingly does, do thou it wittingly. 

Leaf by leaf and branch by branch the un- 
folding of life takes place. Step by step we 
win our liberty as the horizon of life is broad- 
ened to embrace new worlds. There is first 
the realm of the physical, into the freedom of 
which we come as the powers of the body are 
developed. The child can know little of the 
freedom of the world that lies beyond its 



58 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIF^. 

mother's door. But with the growth of its 
bodily powers it passes into the larger liberty 
of the boy's world, and then into that of ex- 
ultant youth, and then into the freedom of man- 
hood's full strength. Only when he has come 
into conscious mastery of the world about him 
can he sing: 

O our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels 

waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew 

unbraced. 
O the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock 

up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, 

the cool silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt 

of the bear. 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in 

his lair. 

How good is man's life, the mere living! How 

fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever 



m joy 



Only he who has felt this surging flood tide 
of energy, who has experienced the wild joys 
of living, the delight in danger, the confidence 
of conscious power — only he knows what the 
freedom of the body means. It is the youth 



LIBERTY. 59 

impatient for the fray; the athlete sure of the 
prize; the soldier fearless in battle; the work- 
man confident in his muscled strength. It is 
the man standing up in the full realization of 
his physical powers. 

But the man who lives content with such 
freedom fails of the real liberty of manhood; 
that is more than the triumph of bone and 
sinew. Life is a many-storied palace, the cham- 
bers of which are more spacious and beautiful 
as we ascend. One who is content with phys- 
ical attainment spends his days in the basement 
of the palace, and never knows the delights of 
the upper chambers. Something more than 
strength of body constitutes the high liberty 
of manhood. Caliban with all his brute 
strength fell down in terror before the spirits 
of the air, while gentle Prospero commanded 
them to do his bidding. History is but the 
story of man's advance from the slavery of 
Caliban to the liberty of Prospero. It is a 
story of superstition giving place to knowledge, 
of liberation into a broader life; it is a story 
of imagination and thought set free. It shows 
us man's gradual realization of himself, his 



6o ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ascent from chamber to chamber in the palace 
of Hfe, the conquest of his Hberty. 

And just in proportion as each man reaUzes 
these highest endowments of Hfe he is free. It 
is intellectual and spiritual liberty, not physical 
unrestraint, that makes the man. Until we 
have felt the thrill that comes of intellectual 
mastery and spiritual emancipation, until we 
can endure and be patient alike in the petty 
vexations and the crucial trials of life, until 
we know what is really meant by, "Thou 
hast made him to have dominion over the works 
of thy hands" — even over ourselves, for he who 
can restrain a power is greater than he who has 
it — until we have realized these things in our 
lives we have not won the highest liberty. 

To such liberty no bounds or limits can be 
set. It is like the light of a sun bursting out all 
sides, revealing world after world in the in- 
finite depths of space. The sky hangs low over 
childhood's head, and the hills are the confines 
of the world. But there comes a time when the 
expanding life breaks away over the low hills 
to the great world beyond, and rises through 
the low-hung sky to the universe of stars. 

And in the conquest of these realms there 



LIBERTY. 6 1 

comes to the man a revelation greater than ail 
these, a revelation of his relation to this larger 
w^orld. He looks upon it no longer in the ig- 
norance of childhood nor with the terror of a 
Caliban, but with the calmness of one who real- 
izes within himself a power that can compass 
and measure and comprehend it all. And with 
this realization of his own high endowments 
comes a new revelation of the essential dignity 
and the possibilities of every human life, call- 
ing forth his sympathies and opening to him a 
greater world of brotherly love. 

Such a man, in the full possession of his 
powers, realizing his true relationship to the 
world about him and to his fellow-man, presid- 
ing over the course of life with calm and sure 
mastery — such a man, and not the freedman 
nor the revolutionist, has won true liberty. He 
has entered the upper chambers of the palace 
of life, and from his high vantage ground looks 
out upon worlds not seen from below. 

But the palace of life is an ancient palace. 
There are no elevators there. If we would 
reach the upper stories, we must toil up the 
tedious stairway. 



62 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

He only earns his freedom and existence 
Who daily conquers them anew. 

Work is the great emancipator. It alone can 
break the fetters from body and mind. It alone 
can give strength for weakness and knowledge 
for ignorance. Nothing else can set men free. 
Circumstance and inheritance may make the 
labor of liberation lighter, but they cannot avail 
alone. The apprentice can never become a 
master by watching the master work. The 
son can never be wise through inheritance of 
his father's wisdom. No man can enjoy any- 
thing till he himself has paid the price. And 
the price of liberty is toil. We are not born 
free, but with power to become free; and that 
power lies in work. 

''There is no real freedom," declares Mr. 
Hamilton Mabie, *'save that which is based 
upon discipline. The chance to do as one 
pleases is not liberty, as so many people imag- 
ine; liberty involves knowledge, self-mastery, 
capacity for exertion, power of resistance.*' 

Discipline does not limit our powers, but 
merely directs them in right channels. The 
wild grape of the thicket runs over the ground 
or clambers upon its neighbors at haphazard, 



LIBERTY. 63 

putting out shoots on all sides. The fruit of 
that vine is wild grapes. The gardener takes 
the same vine and, putting it in a fair place, 
cuts away the shoots and prunes the vine from 
season to season, training it up into the sun. 
And the fruit of that vine is the grapes of the 
garden. The life of the vine has not been 
limited by discipline. Its vitality is not im- 
paired by pruning, but directed. If we would 
have our lives bear the fruit of the garden, we 
must submit to the pruning and training. 



VI. Drudgery. 

He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can bal- 
ance one part of genuine life against two parts of 
drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of 
the one, manfully accept the other. — Louis Ste- 
venson. 

Drudgery is the foundation of every 
worthy Hfe, and the greater the Hfe the deeper 
the foundation. He who would build worthily 
must be willing to spend first much time and 
pains upon work that the world will never see. 
He must be willing to lay deep and firm the 
hidden foundations of his life; and this must 
ever be largely uninspiring work. 

He would be a poor builder who, looking 
upon the splendid pile that seemed to spring 
from the earth, did not know that beneath the 
architecture and the sculpture and beneath the 
pleasant sward there was a rough but carefully 
laid foundation. And yet there is many a 
would-be young builder of life who does not 
realize that the great lives upon which he looks 
with admiring eve rest upon foundations of un- 

(64) ,'. . 



DRUDGERY. 65 

inspiring work sunk deep out of sight. Too late 
in life he learns that a building without foun- 
dations cannot stand. 

The highest callings are not without this 
foundation. The successful banker and lawyer, 
author and artist, can no more escape the un- 
inviting work of routine and detail than can 
the successful farmer and clerk and bookkeeper. 
There is no profession so exalted as to be above 
common toil. No man is so great but his day's 
work partakes of drudgery. Charcoal is, of all 
substances, most closely related to diamond. 
And drudgery is the twin sister of inspiration. 
The man of genius must walk the common 
ways of men before he can soar aloft. 

Unless we recognize this primal element of 
success, the work of a master may be our de- 
spair instead of our inspiration. We watch him 
at work, and his hand moves with consum- 
mate ease; the material takes form under his 
touch as if by a spell of magic, till we are per- 
suaded that "Genius is the ability to do with 
ease what others cannot do at all." But we are 
looking at the superstructure of the master's 
life, and have forgotten the unseen foundations. 
He does work with ease, but it is the ease that 
5 



66 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

comes of great toil. Before the Madonna of 
Raphael we see only the beauty of a finished 
work, but the leaves of the master's sketch- 
book tell the story of the hidden labor, the hun- 
dred heads and hands that the artist drew 
before he put his brush to canvas. The Moses 
of Michael Angelo seems to have grow^n into 
its majestic form, so natural are the lines and 
limbs. No suggestion there of the tedious 
years which the sculptor had spent in the study 
of anatomy. 

The Latin proverb says: 'The poet is born, 
not made." Yet no man ever became a great 
poet who did not pay for that realization the 
price of painstaking toil. T,ennyson might say 
that certain musical groupings of sound in his 
poems had been made unconsciously; but that 
unconsciousness grew out of years of study in 
the technique of his art. The novels of Balzac 
flow with matchless ease and grace of diction, 
yet the author testifies that "there is not a 
phrase, not a thought, that has not been con- 
sidered and reconsidered, read and reread." 
Dr. Nicoll testifies of Henry Drummond's 
works : 'T have never seen manuscripts so care- 
fully revised as his. All he did was apparently 



DRUDGERY. 67 

clone with ease, but there was immense labor be- 
hind it." And Robert Louis Stevenson says 
of his own attainments : ''I imagine nobody ever 
had such pains to learn a trade as I had; but 
I slogged at it day in and day out; and I 
frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) 
I have done more with smaller gifts than 
almost any man of letters in the world." 
Edmund Burke revised one of his speeches 
thirteen times before he would give it to the 
public. 

The workshop of the master is usually closed 
to the world; but could we look in upon him 
at his work, we might discover the secret of 
his success, and learn to say with Carlyle that 
"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking 
pains." The chips of the workshop would be 
some measure of the price which the workman 
pays for excellence; but because the chips are 
hidden and we see only the finished work, we 
are inclined to think that excellence is at- 
tained without effort. The story Is told of 
Michael Angelo that a visitor, returning after 
the lapse of some time to the shop where the 
sculptor was at work upon a statue, expressed 
surprise at the slow progress of the work, and 



6S ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

asked the artist what he had been doing mean- 
time. ''I have removed a shade of thickness 
from the hp," said the workman; "I have 
brought out this vein and softened that Hne a 
httle." "But those are mere trifles," said the 
visitor. "Yes," answered the sculptor; ^'but 
trifles make perfection, and perfection is no 
trifle." 

It cannot be denied that the workman is 
sometimes caught up, as it were, on the wings 
of inspiration, and gifted for the time with a 
power which seems more than human. The 
biographer of this same Michael Angelo tells 
us that he would "strike more diips from the 
hardest marble in a quarter of an hour than 
would be carried off by three young stone- 
cutters in three or four times as long: at one 
blow he would strike off morsels of three or 
four inches, yet with such exactitude was each 
stroke given that a mere atom more would 
sometimes have spoiled the whole work." The 
artist Rubens could throw his colors upon can- 
vas with such speed as to w^ork out in a single 
morning the main features of a painting. But 
this power was not always the possession of 
Angelo and Rubens. It was the mark of the 



DRUDGERY. 69 

finished artist, the resuh of great labor and 
painstaking, the slow-ripening fruit of years. 

Such feats of accomplishment catch our at- 
tention, and we overlook the preparation which 
alone made them possible, as we gaze in ad- 
miration upon a splendid bridge that spans the 
river at a leap, forgetting the earth approaches 
that support the span. No man ever accom- 
plished a great work whose moments of in- 
spiration did not spring from hours of unin- 
spired labor. It is recorded of Dr. John A. 
Broadus, the celebrated preacher, that "he cul- 
tivated a great power of application, and grew 
to have a great ability to work. The wonder- 
ful result of this steady, methodical industry 
was that in after years he could do unheard-of 
things in the briefest time. If genius is the 
ability and willingness to do hard work, he was 
a genius." 

The men "whose deeds fill history's pages" 
would bear us witness that the excellence to 
which they attained came by no breath from 
heaven, but by unremitted toil. There is no 
other way to the goal, no passport to the 
favored, no royal road. There are different 
endowments of energy and judgment and will 



70 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ill men, and different degrees of attainment; 
but the man of ten talents and the man of two 
must pass the same way, the highway of com- 
mon toil. 

The heights by great men reached and kept 
Were not attained by sudden flight ; 

But they, while their companions slept, 
Were toiling upward in the night. 

Now we can hardly believe with Sir Joshua 
Reynolds that any man may become whatever 
he wills to become. We cannot all hope to be 
great even with the most strenuous and con- 
tinued effort. Yet the lives of great men ma}^ 
give help and encouragement to inconspicuous 
and uneventful lives. They may bring us to 
perform with more diligence the everyday 
tasks of a humble career. They may press 
in upon us the fundamental principle that no 
man can make the most of his life without 
great and continuous effort. And this principle 
once incorporated into a life, no limit to its at- 
tainment can be safely predicted. 

Moreo\'er, the world does not stand in great 
need of genius. A Homer, a Shakespeare, a 
Caesar, a Napoleon, every three or four cen- 
turies seems to supply the need. But the world 



DRUDGERY. 71 

does stand in daily need of plain men to per- 
form the plain work of life; men who are will- 
ing to do with their might whatever needs to be 
done; men like Edmund Burke, who, if they 
were shoeblacks, would be the best in the king- 
dom ; men who prefer excellence in small things 
to failure in great. The world's work is a 
manifold, great work, and it has to be done 
from day to day by dint of persistent toil. The 
night is not lighted by meteor flashes, but by 
the steady shining of a myriad stars. 

It may happen that our lives shall consist al- 
most entirely of drudgery, that we shall be 
called upon to spend our days in laying foun- 
dations, with no hope of seeing the completed 
structure. Worthy is the workman who has 
realized the essential dignity of all faithful 
work, and who, if need be, cheerfully casts his 
life from day to day into the foundation of a 
building which others shall enjoy. Blessed 
are the fathers and mothers all over our land 
who are toiling in modest homes with no 
thought of the world's applause nor even of 
a crown of wild olive, but whose single aim 
is that their sons and daughters may have a 
foundation of fine character on which to build 



72 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

their lives. The undistinguished mothers of 
distinguished sons have done no less for the 
w^orld than their children. Margaret Ogilvy 
knew the honor that is due to forgotten found- 
ers when, with winsome Scotch accent, she 
said : "1 would have liked fine to be that Glad- 
stone's mother." The generation which, with- 
out being notable itself, makes possible a noted 
generation has done the world a great service. 

And, finally, drudgery is the foundation of 
success in the invisible world. Life has a 
marvelous transforming power. The rose 
transforms the clod into 'fragrance. The lily 
changes the mud of the marshes into purity. 
Men may turn the drudgery of their days into 
the graces of noble life. It is not the doing 
of pleasant things that wih make us true and 
strong; the deep life is always strenuous, al- 
ways a fight, an overcoming. The body is 
made strong by struggle. The mind is en- 
larged by learning. Richness and strength of 
character come not In the hours of mastery 
but in the hours of strife. We cannot learn 
patience except when tempted to impatience, 
nor perseverance except in the face of despair, 
nor courage except where cowardice lurks. 



DRUDGERY. 73 

Drudgery is the drillmaster that keeps our 
uniforms neat and our accouterments in order. 
Happy are the toilers who can pray with 
Robert Louis Stevenson : "The day returns and 
brings us the petty round of irritating concerns 
and duties. Help us to play the man; help us 
to perform them with laughter and kind faces ; 
let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give 
us to go blithely on our business all day, bring 
us to our resting beds weary and content and 
undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift 
of sleep. Amen." 



VII. The Dignity of Work. 

All work, if it is nobly done, is about alike; 
really so— one has no reward out of it except 
even that same. The spirit it was done in — that 
is blessed or that is cursed — .that is all. — Carlyle. 

Honor and shame from no condition rise ; 
Act well your part, there all the honor lies. 

—Pope. 

It is said the Emperor of China used to plow 
a furrow in the field every year in order to 
dignify agriculture and make the tilling of the 
soil more honorable in the eyes of his people. 
And the tradition has come down to our day 
that some callings are more honorable than 
others. The financier is more highly esteemed 
than the farmer ; the architect, than the mason. 
This discrimination comes from a wrong notion 
as to where honor lies. 

Honor is not inherent in any kind of work. 
It Is not a quality of any occupation. Labor 
may be difficult or easy, it may be skilled or 
unskilled; but it cannot in itself be either 
honorable or dishonorable. These qualities 
(74) 



THE DIGNITY OF WORK. 75 

enter into it with the touch of a human hand. 
Honor is a quaHty of man, and the spirit in 
which he does his work is the soil in which 
honor grows. Work is but the medium tlirough 
which each workman, skilled or unskilled, cul- 
tivates that quality in himself; and it may be 
won as well in the performance of common 
tasks as in the highest reaches of skill. It can 
come through the splitting of rails as well as 
through the making of laws. It is not peculiar 
to any field. There are honorable and dis- 
honorable men in every calling — honorable 
ditchers and dishonorable rulers. 

No occupation can rightly bring the work- 
man into disrepute. There is no dishonor in 
being a chimney sweep. We must know how 
the individual sweep does his work before we 
can know whether he is honorable or dishon- 
orable. It Is in the man, not in the occupation, 
that we must seek that quality. Whatever 
shadow lies upon any kind of labor Is a shadow 
cast by the laborer. A villain was once simply 
a farm laborer; to-day a villain may be any- 
thing from a plowman to a preacher. The 
word once indicated a kind of worker; it now 
Indicates a kind of man. The man brought 



76 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

disrepute upon the work, but like a boomerang 
the disrepute returned to rest on him. The 
work of the laborer was not unworthy in it- 
self — Cincinnatus and Tolstoi count the stain 
of the soil no dishonor on their hands — but 
the laborer came to do his task so unwor- 
thily that at last his stooping shadow fell upon 
the work, and the world began to call it 
menial. 

We have unfortunately come to associate 
honor with skill, and to look upon those occu- 
pations as most honorable which demand the 
greatest skill in their pursuit, as we are inclined 
to rank the man by that which he possesses — 
how much is he worth? — our very speech be- 
traying us. But honor is not at all dependent 
upon talent. It is not rooted in reputation, but 
in character; and, since every man is maker of 
his character, honor is equally possible to all. 
The number of skilled workmen must always 
be comparatively small, but the number of hon- 
orable workmen may be and ought to be as 
great as the number of workers. *'No man," 
said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, "is bound to be 
rich or great or wise, but every man is bound 
to be honest." 



THE DIGNITY OF WORK. 77 

The world rightly sets a higher money value 
upon some kinds of work than upon others. 
It is but just that the physician who has de- 
voted time and money to preparation should 
receive a larger return in money for his day's 
work than does the woodman whose work de- 
mands no preparation. Skilled labor will al- 
ways command higher wages than unskilled, 
on the just ground that the larger the invest- 
ment the larger the returns. But whether the 
skilled physician should be esteemed by his fel- 
low-men more honorable than the woodman 
ought to depend not upon skill or profession 
but upon the way in which each does his ap- 
pointed work. The spirit of the work is the 
measure of honor. The locksmith is honorable, 
the burglar dishonorable : the difference is in 
the spirit in which the work is done. The 
sloven is dishonorable, the careful man hon- 
orable, in every field of labor. 'The man who 
scamps his work," said Dr. James Stalker, "de- 
grades himself." And here again our words 
may give us pause, for a scamp is not one who 
does his task poorly, but "a worthless fellow, 
a villain." The man who scamps his work 
becomes at last a scamp. 



78 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

It is worth noting that great men have not 
made this false distinction between kinds of 
work, but have turned freely from one kind to 
another, as if to teach their followers that all 
faithful work is honorable. Peter the Great 
esteemed it no less honorable to have served his 
apprenticeship at shipbuilding than at nation- 
building. One of the famous Dutch admirals 
was seen, the day after a victory, feeding his 
chickens. Mahomet was a camel driver on the 
desert, and his followers "record with just 
pride that he would mend his own shoes and 
patch his own cloak." Martin Luther contin- 
ued to mend clocks in case of need. Paul, the 
lawyer, scholar, and apostle, did not hesitate to 
win his bread openly by tent-making rather 
than receive it at the hands of others. The 
Man of Galilee did not consider the making of 
plows and yokes incompatible with his mission 
as Saviour of the world, and one of his last 
acts was to teach men that the greatest honor 
may come through the washing of another's 
feet. All work is God-given, and therefore has 
divine possibilities. Yet there are men and 
women with such false notions of life as to look 
down with contempt upon those who serve in 



THE DIGNITY OF WORK. 79 

the great army of workers, forgetting that 
whatever is worthiest in themselves was won 
by sires who wrought in the ranks. 

Great mischief is done by the notion that one 
vocation is noble and another ignoble, that 
honor lies in the position and not in the man. 
Contempt is fostered on one side, discontent on 
the other, and corruption of manhood every- 
where. The bribery and subornation so rife in 
our country to-day could spring only from a 
society that set position above manhood. No 
more stinging rebuke can be administered to the 
false notions and standards prevalent among 
our people than the silent rebuke of George 
Washington, the ex-commander and President, 
devoting himself with all diligence to building 
fences and planting tobacco, entertaining at 
the same time in his country home the repre- 
sentatives of nations, who came to do him 
honor. 

The man who looks down upon another be- 
cause of his occupation is himself unworthy 
the esteem of his fellows. The politician and 
office seeker may cover under a cloak of cordial 
greeting the contempt which he feels for the 
laborer by the wayside; the statesman sees in 



8o ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

the rough, honest man a peer, whose horny, 
toil-stained hand he counts it a privilege to 
shake. On the other hand, the laborer who 
writhes under plain work as under a degrada- 
tion has an equally false notion of honor. Un- 
til he recognizes that the faitliful performance 
of his humble work is as honorable as the work 
of a statesman, he is unfit for the higher posi- 
tion to which he aspires, and would carry into 
it only abuse. His discontent would give place 
to contempt for those below him. Only a good 
servant makes a- good master, for success in 
either relationship depends upon unerring in- 
sight into the underlying principles of work, 
and the recognition of the essential dignity of 
all work faithfully performed. 

Nature seems to have entered into subtle 
league with herself, as it were, to compel a 
recognition of universal equality in the republic 
of labor. The best life of man and nation is the 
result of a mingling of hand and head work. 
The fable of Antaeus the wrestler, who re- 
mained invincible so long as he kept in contact 
with the earth, finds its realization in every life. 
No people can devote their energies exclusively 
to higher spheres of accomplishment and con- 



THE DIGNITY OF WORK. 8i 

tinue vigorous long. When the Greek citizens 
began to look upon common work as fit only 
for helots, Greece began to wane. When the 
French nobility lost touch with their peasants, 
the Revolution was inevitable. Common work 
is the great sympathetic bond which makes of 
the many members of a nation one vital, re- 
sponsive body. Let that bond be severed, and 
paralysis or convulsion follows. The man who 
cultivates the fields of thought alone will find 
at last his work turning insipid and his life 
stagnant. Longfellow found his languid facul- 
ties quickened by work in his garden. 

Moreover, a recognition of the real nature of 
work will bring to us a new spice of joy and 
contentment in our work, whatever be our 
sphere, a satisfaction which no attainment with- 
out that recognition can ever bring. There is 
no dishonor in any kind of work; but great 
honor may come out of our common tasks, if 
only they be done faithfully and in uprightness 
of purpose. They may not seem to fill so large 
a place in the world as some other kinds of 
work, but w^ho shall set himself to judge be- 
tween the great and the small? Conspicuous- 
ness and importance are not always propor- 
6 



82 ESSAY£ ON WORK AND LIFE. 

tioned in the world. The zephyr that kisses our 
cheek may seem of small importance among the 
forces of nature, but without it there would be 
no life on the earth ; the clouds would not rise, 
nor the rains fall, nor the grass grow, nor man 
^be fed. 

There is no great and no small 

To the Soul that maketh all; 

And where it cometh, all things are; 

And it cometh everywhere. 



VIII. Society. 

The solitary animal must die, and can leave no 
successor. Unsociableness is, therefore, banished 
out of the world. — Henry Drummond. 

A man can only reach his highest development 
and employ his powers to the fullest extent in 
society. — Benjamin Kidd. 

Nature frowns upon self-sufficiency even 
in the lowliest of her children. The flowers 
of the wayside would perish from their places 
but for the pollen which wind and insect carry 
from blossom to blossom. The single stalk of 
corn cannot bear grain of itself, nor the solitary 
palm bring forth its fruit, nor the lone fig tree 
yield a harvest. 

In a courtyard of Paris there once grew a 
single date palm. Year after year it blossomed, 
but the blossoms always fell away and left the 
palm tree barren. But one year the dates suc- 
ceeded the bloom, and In due season the tree 
bore a harvest of fruit, in apparent violation 
of nature's law. There was afterwards found 

(S3) 



84 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

across the city a male date palm, and the mys- 
tery was explained. The winds had carried the 
pollen and married the male and the female 
trees. 

From time immemorial the people of Eastern 
countries have broken the branches of the wild 
fig at flowering time and brought them to wave 
over the trees of the garden. It became a festal 
occasion, when the people marched in pro- 
cession to the hills and brought back the flow- 
ering branches to wave with invocation over 
the cultivated trees. They knew that without 
this the harvest would fail, but they attributed 
the increase to the invocation. We know 
that the wild fig is the male and the cultiva- 
ted the female, and that the waving of the 
branches is but the celebration of nature's mar- 
riage. 

There is no such thing in the plan of life as 
the single self-suflicient creature. The lone 
wolf seeks his mate in due season, and the king 
of the desert is but half a king. 

The law of inter-dependence is no less abso- 
lute in the spiritual than in the physical world. 
"No man liveth unto himself.** Our spiritual 
life is quickened Into fruitage only by touch 



SOCIETY. 85 

with Other Hfe. Whoso keepeth his Hfe shaU 
lose it, said the Master of hfe, but whoso giveth 
his hfe shaU save it. And he was not speaking 
as a scribe, but as one who had come that men 
might have hfe and have it more abundantly. 
For centuries after those words were spoken 
men tried to save their lives by keeping them, 
by hoarding them in convent cell or hermit's 
cave. But time proved the endeavor vain. 
Life will not flourish under such conditions. 
They are as fatal to it as dim cellars are to 
flowers. The recluse, be he monk or hermit or 
modern misanthrope, will always be lacking in 
the elements of life. Like fruit grown without 
sunshine, the freshness and flavor will fail. 
These qualities of life are found only in the 
sunny fields of companionship. The isolated 
human being will lose his humanity. To live 
alone, said an ancient sage, one must be either 
a god or a brute. 

The fruits of life, said the apostle, are love, 
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, 
faith, meekness, temperance. Now it is re- 
markable that not one of this cluster of fruits 
can be grown in the soil of solitary life. Not 
one of them will mature in a hermit's cave. 



86 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

Not one of them is self-centered. We can love 
only persons. We can have faith only in peo- 
ple. Gentleness and goodness and patience are 
cultivated only through contact with our fel- 
lows. Joy and peace come not through selfish- 
ness, but through self-forgetfulness. Our affec- 
tions are not reflexive; they require an object. 
Like the electric current, they become real only 
in passing out. Sympathy and forbearance and 
all the fine qualities of life exist only as they 
go out to others. And they grow through ex- 
ercise. 

The little things of life are lessened by giv- 
ing. The more money a man gives the less he 
has. The great things of life are multiplied. 
The more love and tenderness and faith we 
bestow the more we have. ''Your life will not 
be complete till you have children and lose one," 
said a mother who had loved and lost. Our own 
joy and peace depend upon our giving them to 
others. If the child would find these elements 
in life, let him bring them first to father and 
mother. The very condition of life is that we 
give it to others ; on no other condition can we 
get it or keep it. We are social beings by our 
nature. We need to be touched by the pollen of 



SOCIETY. 87 

Other lives before we can bring forth our 
proper fruit. 

Business life offers opportunity, not to be 
found in secret, for the development of certain 
cardinal qualities. Here mind is opposed to 
mind in the practical affairs of the day. Judg- 
ment, decision, alertness, the sterner qualities 
that give poise and firmness to the man, as the 
bones do to the body, are called into action 
through our business intercourse. *'Iron sharp- 
eneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the face of his 
friend." One may learn theories in the closet, 
"but they have no force till they are put 
into practice in the world. "Talent," said 
Goethe, "is developed in secret, but character in 
the stream of life." 

The manifold phases of modern life offer the 
most varied opportunity for bringing cut by 
the cross-fertilization of contact the best that is 
in us. There is scarcely an hour of the day 
when we are not thrown in touch with our fel- 
lows in some relation. It may be in the marts 
of trade, on the street, in the home, in travel, 
in recreation. In every such contact there is a 
giving and taking. We cannot avoid it any 
more than the stars can stay their influences. 



88 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

Such a position demands the greatest care 
and judgment. Opportunities look two ways, 
up and down. There can be no high moun- 
tains without deep valleys. The sensitized 
plate must be handled with greatest care, its 
very excellence putting it in jeopardy every 
hour. 

Sensibility and individuality are measures 
each of the other in the world of humanity. 
He who is most sensible to his surroundings 
is most individual. It is not surroundings, but 
capacity to be touched by them, which make 
the man. It was Wordsworth's sensibility to 
nature that made him her poet. It was Bee- 
thoven's sensibility to sound that distinguished 
him. It was Drummond's sensibility to the 
manifold phases of human nature that made 
him one of the most magnetic of men. It was 
Phillips Brooks's sensibility to the cares and 
sorrows of men that won to him the Wall 
Street broker and the sorrow-laden woman. 
It is our sensibility to the world about us that 
measures our life. We are bathed in the same 
influences that flowed about the lives of these 
men. The difference lie^ in responsiveness to 
their touch. 



SOCIETY. 89 

We step out into the current of life, and its 
influences surge about us. They may make us 
more sensitive or more callous. We may be so 
quickened by contact with others that every 
new touch will bring us into larger knowledge 
and broader sympathy, till we cannot pass 
through the street without feeling in sympa- 
thetic fellowship with the varied world of hu- 
manity about us. We can have compassion 
upon the beggar and bootblack, we can have 
sympathy with the banker, in those things that 
make up their real lives. And so through the 
wonderful possibilities of responsiveness we 
may become all things to all men — not as hypo- 
crites, but as having a life broad enough to em- 
brace and appreciate the lives of others. Wc 
are like the vine — we extend the compass of 
our lives by tendrils. 

But these same influences may produce in us 
a fatal callousness. Early risers have noticed 
that if they did not get up in response to the 
alarm it soon failed to rouse them. Things 
that should stir us may by abuse lull us to deeper 
lethargy. The failure to act in response to the 
appeal of influences about us will set to work a 
paralysis of our sensibilities, and we may be- 



90 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. ' 

come utterly callous to the impress of the world 
about us. We shall then pass men as we do 
posts. We shall bargain with them in the 
market without a touch of the human in our 
dealing. We shall travel with them and not be 
awakened to one new view of humanity. W^e 
shall be shut up within ourselves and left, like 
the ant that has lost its antennae, without the 
means of communicating with those we pass 
upon the way. 

The sense of social touch in man, like the 
sense of feeling in the body, is the faculty by 
which we distinguish ourselves from every- 
thing in the world; and by it alone can we 
realize our individuality. The loss of the one 
means physical paralysis; of the other, spirit- 
ual helplessness. There lurks in our intense 
modern life the danger of losing this fine fac- 
ulty of touch. No danger that any one of us 
shall be lost from society — the monastic system 
is passed — but we may be lost in society, which 
is worse, perhaps. It is of vital importance, 
then, that we guard and guide our relation to 
our fellows. Association should make us 
stronger, not w^eaker. When it fails of that 
result, it has become abuse. 



SOCIETY. 91 

This loss may come to different persons in 
different ways. To the young'man, especially 
of the city, it is likely to come through the 
multiplied diversions that beset his way ; for it 
is the leisure hour as much as the business hour 
that moulds a young man's life. The evening 
invites him to the theater; the holiday, to the 
field of sport; Sunday, to the excursion. In- 
clination and attraction carry him with the 
crowd. He finds self poor company, because he 
never takes the time away from business and 
the crowd to get acquainted with himself. He 
never retires to the dark room to develop the 
impressions taken during the day, but keeps 
the sensitive plate of his nature constantly ex- 
posed, till it at last has lost the power to re- 
spond. He creates an abnormal appetite for 
entertainment, an appetite which grows with 
the gratification of it, and which leads him to 
shun more and more his neglected self. Instead 
of making fellowship the means to greater indi- 
viduality through the healthy exercise of his 
social being, he makes it a means to dependence. 
His sympathies, his appreciations, his fine sensi- 
bility, languish for lack of nurture. His final 
state is that of figurehead among men, of a 



93 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

parasite upon society. A French writer, speak- 
ing of the EngHsh as compared with his own 
people, attributed the success of the former to 
the training of the Enghsh boy ''to find his 
strength within himself." We cannot be in- 
dependent — we must be individual. Our rela- 
tion to society should be that of the oak to its 
fellow, not that of the mistletoe to the oak. 

To the maturer man the loss of social touch 
may come through absorption in the cares of 
business. The stress upon our men of business 
in this century of competition is so great as to 
threaten the complete monopoly of time and 
faculties. The making and realizing of finan- 
cial plans consume the man. He has little time 
to recognize the individuals behind the plans; 
business is cold and logical, and does not con- 
sider sentiment and feeling. He presses his 
business so constantly that he gradually par- 
takes of its nature, till even the sacred func- 
tions of husband and father are neglected, 
and he becomes a mere force in the market, 
a machine for making money. The bloom of 
life may be blasted as quickly in the heat of 
the market place as in the thick atmosphere 
of the throng. Business bears no blame in 



SOCIETY. 



93 



itself, but rather praise. Life is never more 
sane than when its energies are poured out 
freely. It is good to have exacting duties. It 
is right that every life should have plans and 
ambitions running away into the future like 
shining rails that disappear upon the far 
horizon. It is a glorious thing, as George 
Eliot said, to die on fire — provided in the glory 
of it all we do not lose ourselves. For the 
question comes to us in a very real and temporal 
sense in this age of materialism : What shall it 
profit a man if he gain the world and lose him- 
self? 

To the womanhood of our land the loss of 
individuality may also come, but through other 
channels. The claims of society and the de- 
mands of housewifery are so numerous and 
exacting to-day that wives and mothers are in 
danger of losing themselves amid the round of 
social calls and domestic cares. And this is the 
worst of all, for what shall we do when our 
sources have lost their freshness? Where 
should we be but for the impulses that came to 
us out of a mother's exhaustless life, and sus- 
tained us amid the vicissitudes of childhood and 
youth and manhood ? Of all losses, the mother's 



94 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

loss of sympathetic touch is the most to be 
lamented. A good mother who realized what 
such a loss would mean used to go into her 
chamber every day at an appointed hour and 
resolutely shut the door upon the outer world 
and its demands until she could find herself. 

One who never searches himself out from the 
confusion of business and the distraction of 
pleasure, who never leads himself as a bosom 
friend away from the throng for earnest con- 
verse, neglects a prime duty of life. Such a 
one must remain greatly ignorant of his own 
condition and of his relation to his fellows. 
That man must be something less than a full 
man w^ho, passing through life, is forgetful of 
to-day and heedless of to-morrow. "The life 
which asks no questions of itself," says Pro- 
fessor Butler, ''which traces events back to no 
causes and forward to no purposes, which seeks 
no interpretation of what passes within and 
without, is not a human life at all; it is the life 
of an animal." 

Society is essential to man, for only by it 
can he ''reach his highest development and em- 
ploy his powers to the fullest extent." Through 
our social relations there ought to come to each 



SOCIETY. 95 

one a clearer perception and a larger realiza- 
tion of self. But these cannot come in their 
clearness and fullness in the midst of those re- 
lations. He would be a poor sculptor who 
became so engrossed in the strokes of his chisel 
that he never stepped back to get a full view of 
his work. 



IX. Solitude. 

He who would accomplish anything must be 
much alone. — Gladstone. 

Silence is the element in which great things 
fashion themselves together. — Carlyle. 

The true life, like the great river, must have 
its still places. Its reservoirs, where it may 
gather and recuperate its strength when the 
rush of the rapids is past, and from which it 
may without fear of exhaustion pour out its 
re-stored powers in the rapids to come. No life 
can attain to its highest possibilities or accom- 
plish the largest results without its silent hours. 
They are not negative; they should be a very 
positive part of life. They ought to be the full- 
est hours of the day. The still hour is the time 
for reckoning up the accounts of the day's trans- 
actions and seeing how we stand with ourselves 
and the world. Then we can drop the plummet 
and take the soundings; the current of the 
business hour is too swift, the plummet is swept 
away. It is only in retirement and meditation 

(96) , . . , 



SOLITUDE. 97 

that we realize the experiences which the shock 
and stress of the day have brought, and make 
them wholly ours. 

Nor let soft slumber close your eyes 

Before you've recollected thrice 

The train of actions through the day : 

Where have my feet chose out their way? 

What have I learn'd, where'er I've been, 

From all I've heard, from all I've seen? 

What know I more that's worth the knowing? 

What have I done that's worth the doing? 

What have I sought that I should shun? 

What duty have I left undone? 

Or into what new follies run? 

Success, in every field of endeavor, waits upon 
the hour of solitude. The men who have made 
our industrial world what it is to-day, our 
captains of industry, have not been men who 
drifted in the noisy current. They were not to 
be found amid the throng of pleasure seekers 
nor in the floating crowd of the streets. Their 
after-business hours were spent largely in the 
stillness of the counting-room. The improvi- 
dent clerk may devote his leisure hours to dis- 
tractions, but the man who directs and builds 
a business may not. He knows that the matur- 
ing of successful plans cannot be intrusted to 
the distracting hours of trade; they must be 
7 



98 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

laid from the vantage ground of the undis- 
turbed hour, when he can command the entire 
field of proposed action, and correctly measure 
the obstacles to be surmounted and the strength 
of the opposing forces. He succeeds or fails 
by the hour alone rather than by the day upon 
the market. 

The fable of the silent oxen and the murmur- 
ing wheels is a figure of the world's work. 
The real workers are not those who make the 
greatest noise. The power is not in the street 
car, but in the dynamo. The power is not in 
the sales room, but in the counting-room. It 
is not in the shouting of the street and dock, 
but in the ofiice from which the orders come. 
It is not in the babel of the stock exchange, 
but in the ofiices up town to which the wires 
run. The thinkers are the world's dynamos, 
and their work must be done in silence. 

Menial work, which calls for merely me- 
chanical performance, may be done in the midst 
of confusion — the wagoner performs his task 
as well in the bustle of Broadway as in the quiet 
of the country road. But work which is cre- 
ative, which adds something to the world's 
store, demands nothinsf less than the concentra- 



SOLITUDE. 99 

tion of all the workman's energies. And con- 
centration cannot spring from distraction. Few 
men have the power which enabled John Stuart 
Mill to think out his book on logic while walk- 
ing through the streets of London. In order to 
do our fellows the greatest service, we must 
often seek separation from them. What Edison 
has done for the world was made possible in 
the quiet of his laboratory, which fostered long 
periods of concentrated thought. The services 
which Tennyson rendered to the world from the 
Isle of Wight and Wordsworth from the seclu- 
sion of Grasmere are doubtless greater than 
any they could have rendered by throwing 
themselves into the contemporary current of 
English life. Revelation and inspiration come 
to men to-day, as they came to the great men 
of old, upon the hilltop and in the desert and 
in the closet. What the world owes to Elias 
Howe and Samuel Johnson and Haydn came 
out of the solitude of the garret; as what it 
owes to Dante and John the Divine came out of 
exile life. 

However the great things of earth may have 
gotten themselves bodied forth amid confusion 
and conflict, their conception has always taken 



loo ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

place under the brooding wing of solitude» 
The Mohammedan reHgion was conceived in 
the stilhiess of the desert. The Reformation 
had its source in the study of a university pro- 
fessor. The followers of Wesley date their 
movement from a student's room at Oxford. 
The battles of Napoleon were won before the 
clash of arms began. The insight and en- 
durance of Lincoln came from the years when 
he would "sit up half the night trying to solve 
the problems of the day." And often in the 
great world's workshop midnight oil has been 
the lubricator upon the wheels of accomplish- 
ment. 

Solitude has often been a necessary schooling 
for great work among men. Moses spent forty 
years among the mountains of Midian before 
he became Israel's leader. Paul passed five 
years in the desert of Arabia before he became 
the great apostle. What happened during those 
forty years of shepherd life, we are not told, 
only that the burning bush did not appear to 
the sycophant fresh from Pharaoh's court. It 
took two score years of solitude to prepare for 
that vision and voice on the mountain. What 
happened during those five years In Arabia, no 



SOLITUDE. ioi 

record tells„ Perhaps the season of retirement 
was necessary in order that the bhnding vision 
which had come upon the road to Damascus 
might have time to sink unbkuTed into the 
apostle's hfe and become clear in its signifi- 
cance. Certainly he needed to be undisturbed 
while the roots of his life, which had been torn 
so violently from the old soil, were taking hold 
of the soil into which they had been trans- 
planted and in which they were to bear such a 
harvest of fruit. 

It is worthy of notice that those unrecorded 
years of solitude did not cultivate in either of 
these men a spirit of asceticism. Their retire- 
ment was not that of monk or hermit. Its 
end was not separation from men. Retirement 
is justified only as it fits for service. In each 
life retirement was preceded by citizenship and 
followed by public ministry. The half of 
Moses's life was spent at the king's court, and 
of Paul's in the society of the capital city. 
Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the 
Egyptians, and Paul had sat at Gamaliel's feet. 
They had both lived among men and learned 
of them. That, too, must enter into the prep- 
aration of him who would serve his fellows 



I02 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

with real service. We cannot help others ex- 
cept as we have a knowledge of them which 
comes through sympathetic touch. The rapt 
visionary is of small service. Peter the Her- 
mit failed, with all his zeal, to deliver the Holy 
Sepulcher, or even to bring his followers with- 
in sight of the Holy City. Godfrey of Bouillon, 
soldier and man of the world, was crowned 
ruler of Jerusalem. Only he whose life has 
been made strong in the ways of men can 
greatly help them. Even the man of genius, 
said Samuel Smiles, can do nothing of worth 
in regard to human affairs unless he has been in 
some way or other connected with the serious, 
everyday business of life. The sustaining 
draught is that which is dipped from the stream 
of daily life and distilled over the fires of medi- 
tation. The lives of Moses and Paul could not, 
even by inspiration, have been so full of service 
but for this mingling of society and solitude. 

Life consists in a healthy mingling of these 
two elements, as the day does in sunshine and 
shadow. ''Solitude is impracticable/' said 
Emerson, "and society fatal. We must keep 
our head in the one and our hands in the other. 
The conditions are met if we keep our inde- 



SOLITUDE. 103 

pendence yet do not lose our sympathy. These 
wonderful horses need to be driven by fine 
hands. We require such a solitude as shall 
hold us to its revelations when we are in the 
street and in palaces." 

Not only is the hour of solitude essential for 
the remarshaling of forces against the coming 
shock of battle ; not only is it a place of retreat 
for reflection, when we may bend back the 
branch of the day and enjoy its fruits again. 
It may be a crucible. The truest tests of life are 
sometimes those that come to us, as they came 
to Him, in the solitude. There, stripped of all 
bolstering circumstance, our strength or our 
weakness is made plain. Actions buttressed by 
surroundings are often a false measure of the 
man. Our code of law recognizes an element 
of circumstance. But the steady light of the 
silent hour, like the X-ray that strips away all 
circumstance, reveals the man as he is. Peter's 
denials by the crowded fireside showed his im- 
pulsiveness, but his sorrow when alone was a 
better index of the man as time and trial re- 
vealed him. 

Above all, the hours of solitude are the source 
of the strength of life. They look out over the 



I04 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

busy day. They send into it a dominating in- 
fluence. They guard it against unexpected at- 
tack and reenforce it in the hour of conflict. 
Every soul should have these citadels, guarded 
against the prying eye of the curious, sacred 
against intrusion. 

Tfie Hebrew people had a sacred place, to 
which no stranger might approach, and as long 
as it remained sacred to them it was the seat 
of the nation's strength. The holy of hohes 
was a symbol of reverence in the soul of the 
Hebrew nation, and while it remained a true 
symbol they had an inexhaustible source of 
strength. The Assyrian might sack the tem- 
ple and carry captive its votaries; the Roman 
might hold his pagan orgies before the altar; 
but so long as a Daniel turned his face toward 
the holy mount, so long as the sacred fire 
burned in the soul of a Maccabseus, the He- 
brew people were unconquered. When the 
Hebrew himself began to sell oxen about the 
portal of the temple, the Shekinah faded from 
the altar and virtue from the Hebrew life. 

The life that would be strong must have its 
sacred place where the light abides. Throw 
open all the chambers to the come and go of 



SOLITUDE. 



^05 



the crowd, and somehow the light will fade and 
the virtue pass out of life. Every man should 
guard the sacredness of a holy of holies in 
the temple of life, into which he alone should 
have entrance as high priest. 



X. Play. 

The boy's play, in a real sense, creates the man ; 
the man's play re-creates him by re-vitalizing him, 
refreshing him and restoring to him that delight 
in activity for its own sake which is the evidence 
of fresh impulse. — Hamilton Mabie. 

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. — 
Adage. 

Thomas Carlyle is credited with saying 
that his notion of heaven was a place where 
the angels make continual progress toward 
youth. 

If only the river as it flows through the 
hills could preserve the sparkle and freshness 
of its source, so that those who stooped to 
partake of its waters might drink as from the 
mountain spring! if its stream were never 
polluted and its waters never lost in stag- 
nant bayous! if the sails of commerce that 
whiten on its bosom were reflected from a 
limpid current! if the great river as it pours 
into the ocean were but the crystal source 
multiplied manifold! 
(io6) 



PLAY. 107 

If only the river of life as it flows through 
the hills of time could keep the freshness and 
flavor of youth ! if its waters never grew turbid 
nor its current sluggish! if, as it bore down 
toward the infinite ocean, its breadth and its 
depth were but the sparkling waters of the 
fountain of youth multiplied by the valleys and 
hills of time ! 

But the frosts of winter will come to chill 
and check the flow of the river, and storms will 
bring stains from the hills, and gloomy skies 
will find reflection in the river's bosom. The 
river of water and the river of life must flow 
through earthy channels and partake of that 
through which they flow. Their progress is 
not toward perpetual youth. And yet there are 
rivers that find for themselves in their channels 
springs of refreshing which stay with their 
warmth the chill of winter, and check with their 
flow the stain of the valleys, and make glad 
with their sparkle the shadowy places. Such 
rivers leave blessing and benediction wherever 
they pass. Such rivers preserve after all the 
essence of youth. 

The danger of increasing years is that they 
shall bring the stream of life to run sluggish 



io8 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

and low. Who cannot recall the picture of an 
old man of once far-reaching interests, bent 
now over a little plot of ground upon which he 
spends the last lingering hours, unmindful of 
the world? Who has not seen the touching 
picture of an old woman withdrawn into her 
corner beside the smoldering fire, indifferent 
to the ocean of life beyond her cottage door? 
As if the current that once surged through the 
very branch tips of the tree of life had set back- 
ward and were now slowly ebbing out from the 
trunk. 

To the life that retains the all-preserving 
spirit of youth such an ending can never come, 
for each added year will but bring new strength 
and alertness to the faculties, as they give to 
the healthy tree wider reach of root and branch. 
*'I am seventy years young," said the genial 
Dr. Holmes In answer to the question how old 
he was. *'They will take me there some day," 
said Russell Lowell with fine humor, as he 
was passing one day a "Home for Incurable 
Children." Dr. Johnson, when revisiting in 
later years the scenes of his youth, could not 
resist the Impulse to once more roll down the 
hill where he had played as a boy. 



PLAY. 109 

Herein lies the secret of power in these men. 
They remained through all the vicissitudes of 
years essentially children. The lapse of time 
did not dull the fine edge of their appreciation, 
but only added to it an accelerated vis viva. 
Every day brought them, as it were, into a new 
birth — it brought them to new discoveries 
through keener perceptions and stronger facul- 
ties and tenderer sensibilities. They never lost 
the power of looking upon the world with the 
wondering eyes of youth; so it never became 
common to them, but remained to the end full 
of marvels, as it was in the first great years of 
revelation. They never lacked the zest and 
relish of the child who wakes every morning 
into a new creation ; and so the evil days never 
came when they could say, 'T have no pleasure 
in them." If they had not bathed in the myth- 
ical fountain of Ponce de Leon, they had found 
by the way such springs of refreshing as sus- 
tained the course of their lives through three 
score and ten fertile years of running. 

Youth is not a matter of time, but of spirit. 
Growth is life; the absence of it Is death, re- 
gardless of the years. When a man ceases to 
grow, he is old ; so some men are old at thirty. 



no ESSAVS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

and some young at eighty. We live "in feel- 
ings, not in figures on a dial." The man of 
sixty who stoops with stiffened mind over his 
one remaining petty interest is weighed down 
with age, but not with years. Mr. Gladstone, 
who in his eighty-fifth year administered the 
affairs of the British Empire, was buoyed up 
beneath the weight of years by the spirit of 
youth. 

Life is measured not by time but sensibility. 
It is not a coral polyp that turns to stone below 
as fast as it grows above, but a tree the vitality 
of whose branches depends upon the undi- 
minished vigor of trunk and root. As every 
twig of the tree is fed by all the growth of 
years, so every day of a healthy life is sup- 
ported by all the days that have gone before. 
That life may continue vigorous, there must 
be a vital connection between the early and the 
later years, youth flowing through maturity to 
give it strength. 

The richness of our lives, therefore, depends 
upon the degree to which we keep in touch 
with our past, for that is always the degree to 
which we can come into touch with our present. 
The extent to which a man can become a boy 



PLAY. Ill 

again and sympathize with the joys and sor- 
rows, the desires and passions, the weaknesses, 
of childhood ; the degree to which he can enter 
into the fancies and enthusiasms of youth ; the 
sharpness of his interest in the plans and am- 
bitions of manhood; the breadth and depth of 
his compassion with struggling humanity 
everywhere — these mark the boundaries of his 
life. In so far as any one of these sympathies 
is lost, life is limited, that root of the tree is 
dead. Faust was an old man not because of 
white locks but because he had lost touch with 
his past and had no interest in the extrava- 
gances of youth. He had to be rejuvenated. 
But to be transported by magic to the days of 
youth is one thing, and to carry the spirit of 
youth as a sustaining power into maturer years 
is another. "Except ye become as little chil- 
dren," said the Master of life, taking a little 
child up in his arms, "ye cannot enter into 
the kingdom of heaven ;" and in the compas- 
sionate act he taught, as he so often did, 
by silent example the application of his pre- 
cept. Whatever that kingdom may be, it is 
the kingdom of life, with no place for the 
withered branches and the dead roots of the 



112 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

tree of life. One cannot think of it as a place 
where each would not enter into the experi- 
ences of all. 

'The abiding spirit of the child" is a cumu- 
lative power in a man's life. It fuses into 
oneness all its elements and makes life more 
effective at every point of touch, as cohesion 
among the particles of a diamond adds the 
Influence of all to the one crystal at the point 
of contact. Martin Luther could write boyish 
letters to his son, and theses that shook the 
world. He could compose a Christmas carol 
for children, and lead a reformation. And the 
one side of the man was dependent on the 
other; the playmate of children strengthened 
the leader of men. There was no division in 
the great reformer, no dissipation of energies. 
"When we have the expression of a man's 
power and energy on the one side," said Bayard 
Taylor, "and his delicacy of mind and playful 
tenderness of heart on the other, we have the 
broadest measure of his character. The in- 
fluence of Luther on German literature cannot 
be explained until we see how sound and vig- 
orous and manifold was the new spirit which 
he infused into the language." 



PLAY. 113 

The biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson 
reveals the secret spring of that writer's power 
in the winsome picture which he gives us of 
the author playing at soldiers with his little 
stepson. ''Upon the attic floor a map was 
roughly drawn in chalks of different colors, 
w^ith mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and 
roads of two classes. Here we would play by 
the hour with tingling fingers and stiffening 
knees, and an intentness, zest, and excitement 
that I shall never forget." This, too, in a 
Swiss chalet of the high Alps, whither Ste- 
venson had gone as an invalid. And the 
biographer adds: ''Year after year he re- 
verted to the game, and even in Samoa there 
w^as a campaign room with the map colored 
on the floor." Small wonder that a man with 
such inexhaustible resources of interest and 
enjoyment could say, "I was never bored in my 
life;" and when that Hfe, withal a life of sick 
room and suffering, was well-nigh spent, could 
say of it, "It was great fun." All chambers of 
life instantly opened the doors of their treasur- 
ies to him at the sesame of sympathetic touch. 
"He was," said a fellow-countryman, "the 
spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this 
8 



114 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

old world of ours and compelling it to come 
back and play." No wonder such a life grew 
in magnetism and power to the very end. 

The spirit of play is life's preservative. The 
man who has lost it has lost the secret spring 
iof life. He may not lack energy, but he lacks 
vitality, and in the end the stream of his life 
will run sluggish. Play is not an unmanly 
thing. It is not an accident of early years to 
be put away with childish things, but the es- 
sence of life, to the man as well as to the child. 

The secret of the child's play and of the 
father's success are one. The child does not 
amuse itself with one toy all the while, but 
turns from one to another with ever-new in- 
terest. The boy does not confine himself to one 
plaything, but passes through the round of 
tops and marbles and popgun and bow and 
arrow, keeping up by the change an interest 
that would otherwise lag. Who can estimate 
the effect which playthings have upon the life 
of the child in training the powers of observa- 
tion and judgment and invention, in sharpen- 
ing imagination, in giving to all the mental 
faculties alertness and strength? And the 
qualities thus cultivated through the earlier 



PLAY. 115 

years are sustained and strengthened in the 
same way through later years, by diversity of 
interest. 

The dominant elements of play are freshness 
and enthusiasm. Let these be lost, and play 
becomes work. Infuse them into work, and it 
becomes play. The same thing which to the 
amateur is play becomes work to the profession- 
al who earns his bread by it. A father set his 
boy to throw a heap of stones into the river, 
but the boy got genuinely tired before half the 
task w^as done. Then the father suggested that 
he see how often he could hit a tree that stood 
in the water's edge, and the stones were gone 
before the boy knew it. A new element had 
entered into the task, an enthusiasm, which 
turned the work into play. But freshness and 
enthusiasm are the essential elements of suc- 
cess in every distinctive work. "Nothing great 
was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Con- 
tinued work in any single direction exhausts 
the reservoirs. The workman must have di- 
version while these reservoirs fill again. 

The man who would do the most effective 
work in any field will not confine himself to 
that field. He will have his time of relaxa- 



ii6 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

tion and recreation. When Ben-Hur was put 
into the galleys, lie asked to be changed from 
side to side of the ship, lest by sitting always 
in the same position the muscles in one side of 
his body should be developed to the neglect of 
those in the other side. Now, the faculties of 
the mind, like the muscles of the body, are so 
adjusted as to relieve each other by relays, as 
it were. While some are in action, others are 
at rest. A change of interest is necessary that 
the taxed faculties may have relaxation and the 
idle ones exercise. Thus the mind is enabled 
to preserve its normal balance, and in propor- 
tion as that balance is preserved life is sane 
and vigorous. 

Charles Darwin was, in his earlier years, a 
great lover of nature and literature, but he de- 
voted himself so entirely to scientific pursuits 
that the aesthetic side of the man w^asted away. 
The landscape that had once thrilled him no 
longer had any charm; the works of Shakes- 
peare had no appeal for him. Lamenting the 
loss in his later years, he said that if it were 
possible to live his life over he would cultivate 
a love of the beautiful by exercising it every 
day. 



PLAY. 



117 



The tree of life depends as much upon its 
lateral roots as upon its taproot. It is re- 
corded of the late Professor Rowland, one of 
the most eminent scientists of his day, that "in 
winter the horse, in summer the sailboat, gave 
him never-failing delight. He knew where 
to find the trout and how to handle the rod. 
He would take great risks in following the 
hounds." 

Bancroft the historian took time for the cul- 
tivation of flowers. And Dr. Hale declares 
with much feeling: "It is to me, therefore, 
always a pleasure to recollect that Bancroft 
and Francis Parkman, in the midst of their hard 
work that we might know^ something, had 
heart and time and insight and inspiration and 
determination and courage enough to help the 
world forward in the cultivation of perfect 
roses." 

The biographer of Henry Drummond gives 
us this pen picture of his hero : "You spoke 
and found him keen to any of a hundred inter- 
ests. He fished, he shot, he skated as few 
can, he played cricket; he would go any dis- 
tance to see a fire or a football match. He had 
a new story, a new puzzle, or a new joke every 



ilS essays on work and life. 

time he met you. Was it on the street? He 
drew you to watch two message boys meet, 
grin, knock each other's hats off, lay down 
their baskets and enjoy a friendly chaffer of 
marbles. . . . If it was a rainy afternoon in 
a country house, he described a new game, and 
in five minutes everybody was in the thick of 
it. If it was at a children's party, they clam- 
ored for his sleight-of-hand. He smoked, he 
played billiards; lounging in the sun, he could 
be the laziest man you ever saw." It was this 
sympathetic touch with every age and condi- 
tion of men which constituted the wonderful 
charm of the man, and which enabled his 
friends to say of him : "He was the most vital 
man I ever saw, who never loitered, never 
wearied, never was conventional, pedantic, 
formal, who simply reveled in the fullness of 
Hfe." 

We are not wont to associate the lighter 
vein of recreation with George Washington, 
but a biographer has given us this dehghtful 
glimpse into that side of our hero's nature : 
"He loved horses and dogs with the heartiest 
sportsman of them all. He had a great gusto 
for stalking- deer with Geors:e Mason on the 



PLAY. 119 

broad forested tracts round Gunston Hall, and 
liked often to take gun or rod for lesser game 
when the days fell dull; but best of all he 
loved a horse's back and the hard ride for 
hours together after the dogs and a crafty 
quarry." 

These were men who held the mastery over 
life. They were not driven by the stress of 
work, though no men of their day had heavier 
burdens or more absorbing interests, and no 
men served their generations more greatly — 
they were not gentlemen of leisure. Yet withal, 
they presided over the course of life with calm 
and confident mastery. They neither hasted 
nor wasted. They never lacked power nor 
vitality. They worked well because they played 
well. 

Play in its broadest sense, however, is not 
limited to the recognized sports and gaines. 
It is always well for a man, to be sure, if he 
can retain that hearty enthusiasm of youth 
which will enable him on occasion to throv/ 
himself with the abandonment of real enjoy- 
ment into a sharp contest on the field of sport, 
to join in the chase with the spirit of a lover, 
to lose himself in the excitement of the hunt. 



120 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

But these fields of recreation are not open to 
all, nor are they the only means by which one 
may secure the beneficent effects of play. 

Whatever diverts the energies from their 
accustomed channel has in it the essential ele- 
ments of play, no matter how mild or how 
strenuous the diversion be. What is work in 
one case may be play in another. One man may 
chop wood for recreation, another read Greek. 
Mr. Gladstone had in his study three desks, 
each devoted to a separate interest. One was 
given over to political matters, another to re- 
ligious questions, a third to literary w^ork; and 
he was used to pass from one to another, be- 
coming by turns statesman, theologian, author. 
And when these failed of interest, he betook 
himself to the ax and the forest. Nor did 
diversity weaken him in any field. Statesman- 
ship was his calling, but his other interests 
rather strengthened him in this by broadening 
his experience, knowledge, and sympathy. The 
work of statesman could not bring out all the 
potentialities of the man. He was detennined 
to become a well-rounded man, and in becom- 
ing such he became one of the greatest states- 
men of his age. 



PLAY. i2t 

No man of one interest can reach his highest 
efficiency, even in that interest. In this day of 
speciaHsts it is worth while to guard against 
the fallacy that the work accomplished in any 
field is measured by the time spent upon it 
and not by the freshness and vigor brought to 
bear. The most vigorous mind will lose its 
keenness after a period of application, and 
when that limit is reached further effort is 
waste of time and abuse of mind. It has been 
said that three hours a day is the limit of high 
mental work. Certainly more can be accom- 
plished in three hours of absorbing application 
when the faculties are focused upon the work 
than in twice that time when the mind is list- 
less. "A single hour of composition won from 
the business of the day," quotes Samuel 
Smiles from Gifford the editor, "is worth more 
than the whole day's toil of him who works at 
the trade of literature; in the one case the spirit 
comes joyfully to refresh itself like a hart by 
the water brooks; in the other it pursues its 
miserable way panting and jaded, with the 
dogs of hunger and necessity behind." 

Amid the toil and tension of a century of 
work the worker must still remember that the 



122 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

best results cannot be secured through keeping 
constantly at it; that "To work long and with 
cumulative power, one must play often and 
honestly." Play is the spring which bubbles 
up here or there in the channel of the river of 
life, the quickening waters of which are a per- 
vading antidote against corruption and stagna- 
tion of the stream. 



XI. Rest. 

We must rest to be able to work well, and work 
to be able to enjoy rest. — Lubbock. 

There is a condition familiar to men of letters, 
and I suppose to artists of all descriptions, which 
may be called a moulting state. The imagination, 
exhausted by long efforts, sheds its feathers, and 
mind and body remain sick and dispirited till they 
grow again. — Froude. 

The silver cord of life is triple. Work, play, 
and rest, in equal parts, make up the strand. 
No one of them may be magnified at the ex- 
pense of another. All work and no play is 
drudgery; all rest and no work is stagnation. 
The virtue of each depends upon the others. 
Tiliey support and strengthen each other. The 
strongest life is that which consists of the three 
elements in true proportion. 

We cannot continue to put forth energy in- 
definitely, like a machine. Our strength is like 
the ocean tide: it has its ebb and its flow, its 
high and its low potential. To every workman, 
whether artist or artisan, whether worker with 

(123) 



124 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

head or hand, there come times when the tide 
has run out. The laborer goes out fresh to his 
work in the morning ; at evening he comes back 
jaded. The artist appHes himself to his task 
all the winter ; when summer comes, his energies 
have run low. Body and mind demand regular 
times of relaxation. The bow kept tense loses 
its virtue. The tension of life must be regu- 
larly relieved if we would preserve that elas- 
ticity which is its virtue and strength. 

Recreation has its place, but it cannot sub- 
stitute rest. No man has so much energy that 
he can keep the reservoir full by turning the 
stream in different directions. Work exhausts. 
The farmer rotates the crops upon his fields 
in order to relieve the lands; but he gets the 
best permanent returns by letting each field lie 
idle once in three or four years. Some element 
of the soil has been consumed by the successive 
crops, and only rest can restore it. Every life 
that would bear its largest harvest must have 
its season of rest. It must lie fallow. There 
are times when doing nothing is doing the 
most for your life. 

There is no economy in shortening the night 
and striking the holidays from the calendar. 



REST. 135 

We shall not get rich by robbing ourselves. 
Nature has fixed the law of proportionate parts 
in life as well as in the physical world. Two 
parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen, no more 
and no less, make water. Equal parts of work, 
play, and rest make life. And the one law is 
as universal as the other. Men may seem for a 
season to set the law aside and compound life 
according to their pleasure, but nature will not 
be thwarted. If the worker does not recognize 
her, she will assert herself one day and claim 
her own with usury, heaping up the hours of 
idleness while he lies powerless to resist. He 
may give over to work for a season the hours 
of rest, but they must be paid back with inter- 
est. We cannot save time; we can only use it. 
Burning the candle at both ends is a costly ex- 
periment. 

Vigor of body and mind alike depends upon 
the giving of self at the proper time to rest. 
Other things being equal, that man will be most 
successful who can, while at work, completely 
concentrate his energies, and can afterwards 
surrender himself unreservedly to rest. Na- 
poleon's success was due in no small measure to 
the command which he had over himself. On 



126 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

the eve of battle he could throw himself down 
in his tent and in a moment be asleep. 

Life needs its hours of idleness, its days of 
brooding. 'Tis then that nature, left free to 
work in her alchemic chambers, builds up the 
energies anew. They are the coaling stations 
on the way, where the ship, lying at rest, takes 
on fuel with which to continue the voyage. 
Without such stations the fires of the hidden 
engines would die out and the ship fail of her 
ultimate haven. The good captain runs no risk 
of having his bunkers give out between sta- 
tions; he makes haste slowly, knowing the re- 
quirements of the voyage. 

"My soul's one wish," said Thomas Carlyle 
from his quiet retreat when "The French Revo- 
lution" was finished, "My soul's one wish is to 
be left alone, to hear the rustle of the trees, 
the music of the burn, to lie vacant, as ugly and 
stupid as I like. There is soothing and heal- 
ing for me in the green solitude of these simple 
places." Turner, the famous painter, used to 
spend hours lying prone upon his back in a 
boat watching the floating clouds as they 
passed; but those dokc far nicntc hours were 
not lost to the artist In his studio. The mani- 



REST. 137 

fold strings of the harp of Hfe may be made 
to yield wonderful strains,^ but the pauses are 
always a part of the music. 

Even the practical business world is begin- 
ning to see the economic relation between work 
and rest. Employers are recognizing that the 
work accomplished is not proportioned to the 
time spent in the shop, but that more satis- 
factory results are obtained from an eight-hour 
day than from the old sun-to-sun system. The 
twenty-four hours of the day may well be given 
in equal parts to labor, recreation, and rest. 

There are two kinds of rest that minister to 
the needs of men. The one all men share ; the 
other all may share. The one is bodily relaxa- 
tion ; the other is spiritual repose. The first is 
primarily physical in its effect, and is enjoyed 
by all ages and conditions alike; the second 
ministers especially to the higher nature in men, 
and its need is felt in proportion as that nature 
develops. The little child knows nothing of 
receptive relaxation. Its nature finds all needed 
rest in sleep, and no other rest can even be Im- 
posed upon it — the child forced to be still will 
soon be asleep. The African too, a child in na- 



128 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

ture, finds the needs of his simple life met by al- 
ternate work and sleep. Lying under the shade 
of the trees at midday, his hour of rest is an 
hour of forgetfulness. The day's work done, 
he is off to bed ; the narrower the margin be- 
tween work and sleep, the more content he is. 
It is significant that mythology, which comes 
out of the childhood of the race, has no deity to 
incarnate this waking repose. Vulcan and 
Hercules it has, gods of labor and might; 
Somnus and Morpheus, gods of lethe and sleep ; 
Clio and Calliope, the Muses — but no god of 
rest. 

The immature individual or race feels no need 
of the quiet hour that falls between the day of 
stress and the night of sleep. But such hours 
are as essential to the full and harmonious de- 
velopment of our natures as are the hours of 
sleep to the vigor and endurance of the body. 
The need of such rest, peculiar to the higher 
nature of men, was recognized and provided 
for from the very beginning in the setting aside 
of a seventh day for rest ; and because man in 
his infancy did not himself recognize the need 
of such a day, it was laid down in external law. 
The purely physical has no need of a day of rest. 



REST. 129 

Night provides for all the needs of the animal. 
The ant continues to gather its stores as dili- 
gently on the seventh as on the first day. The 
bee improves the shining hours of the Sabbath 
as well as of the other days of the week. The 
seventh day w^as not set aside arbitrarily. It 
was not decreed in order to compel a recogni- 
tion of the Creator and man's duty to him. 
Though superficially an arbitrary law, as all 
laws for the child are arbitrary from his point 
of view, it was given for the sake of that nature 
in us which makes us higher than the beast, a 
nature which needed from its very birth the 
ministry of a day of rest as well as a night of 
rest to bring it to maturity. Like the law of 
work, the law of the SabLath of rest was written 
in man before it was inscribed on stone. 

Men have sometimes tried to set aside the 
law of the Sabbath as though it were non- 
essential to the welfare of man to-day, but the 
results have always been a sufficient refutation 
of their belief. More than a century ago the 
people of France nullified the seventh day for a 
while in their count of time. To-day France 
recognizes no Sunday in her laws, and her 
political elections are regularly held on that 
9 



130 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

day. The pulse of her great capital is as fever- 
ish on the seventh day as on any other day of 
the week. May not these things sufficiently 
explain the fact that France is one of the least 
spiritual among the great nations, and that her 
chief city is rife with revolution and im- 
morality? The safeguard of national welfare, 
as of individual well-being, lies in the recogni- 
tion of the need in every human life of a day 
of rest. 

Let us not mistake, however, the significance 
of that day. The night of rest brings physical 
and mental recuperation. The day of rest 
ministers to spiritual repose. But repose does 
not mean lethargy nor inactivity. It is not an 
element of inaction, but of action. It is that 
quality which enables a man to preserve un- 
shaken poise in conflict, self-mastery ni the face 
of provocation, serenity in the midst of storm. 
It is the ballast deep down in the hold of the 
ship of life which enables the vessel to right 
herself when the winds beat aloft on the sails. 

Perhaps no commandment has been so abused 
in its interpretation as the fourth. Men have 
seen only the negative side, the command to 
cease from the labors of the week. They look 



REST. • 131 

forward through six days of toil to the seventh 
as a time for recuperation of exhausted energy. 
They rob the week day of recreation and the 
night of rest, expecting to pay back the bor- 
rowed hours on the seventh day. But that day 
has a function of its own in the economy of 
human hfe. It has a pecuHar ministry. It is 
not a surplus day from which hours may be 
borrowed at liberty to fill up deficiencies made 
by the overdraft of secular work. To work 
until midnight Saturday and make up the loss 
of rest on the morrow is as real a violation as 
to do the work of Saturday on the next day. 
The seventh day should find the physical man 
unimpaired, and it will find him so if work and 
rest are properly proportioned through the pre- 
ceding six days. Then the day of rest will 
mean the laying aside of the secular cares under 
which the spirit has been bowed, and letting 
the spirit stand upright and free in an unwea- 
ried body. Just in proportion as the seventh day 
finds the man wearied, or engaged with secu- 
lar affairs, the spirit, to the ministry of which 
that day Is appointed, is robbed of its due. 

From this standpoint the man who uses the 
seventh day to regather spent forces, or who 



132 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

takes business with him into the pew, violates 
the fourth commandment no less than the man 
who plow^s his field ; for in either case the spirit 
is left bowed and faint; in either case the man 
misses that repose of being which will make 
his life well-poised and unshakable ; he fails of 
that ballast which would have held the vessel 
steady and made its sailing sure through 
changeful winds. The day of rest was ap- 
pointed to minister to the repose, not of that 
day, but of the week of activity. In the deep- 
est sense the Sabbath was made for man. 

But rest demands as distinct limitations as 
does work or play. Intemperance in the matter 
of idleness is as serious as in any other. All 
rest is no rest — the idler's life is unbroken 
weariness. Rest exists only by contrast. It is 
relaxation from work. The two are as insep- 
arable as the two sides of a coin. "Two men 
each painted a picture," said Henry Drummond, 
''to illustrate his conception of rest. The first 
chose for his scene a still, lone lake among the 
far-off mountains. The second threw on his 
canvas a thundering waterfall with a fragile 
birch tree bending over the foam; at the fork 



REST. 133 

of a branch, almost wet with the cataract's 
spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was 
only stagnation ; the last was rest — for in rest 
there are always two elements : tranquillity and 
energy." And John Ruskin voices the same 
thought when he says: 'The rest which is 
elorious is of the chamois crouched breathless 
in its granite bed, not of the stalled ox over his 
fodder." Only the toiler knows what rest is, 
the man whose energies are poured out all day. 

Finally, rest can never be an end, but only a 
means in life. We may not strive after it. It 
must come as an incident to work, and pass 
with the passing need. It is not the camp, the 
campaign ended, but the bivouac by the wayside 
with to-morrow's march in view. Nirvana, the 
realm of eternal rest, may be the ideal heaven 
of the indolent Buddhist; it can never be the 
ideal of the true human life. The man who has 
wrought himself out through years of effort 
could not, without complete revulsion of nature, 
find his highest happiness in unbroken rest, 
as active lives everywhere have in their last 
years given ample proof. Work and rest must 
continue to succeed each other if they are to 
bring forth their proper fruit, fullness of life. 



XII. Service. 

The desire to rear as high as possible in the air 
the pyramid of my existence, of which the base is 
given and placed for me,^predominates over every 
other, and scarcely allows itself for a moment to 
be forgotten. I must not neglect myself. — Goethe. 

The aim and end of life is the harmonious and 
complete development of the man, individually, 
socially, politically, and religiously, each one de- 
voting his constant and total activity to the wel- 
fare of his fellows in loving service. — Noah K. 
Davis. 

Two things could scarcely be more different 
in api:)earance than the branch and its fruit. 
To see them apart, one would never suspect a 
relation between them. The man who knew 
nothing of the growth of fruits would not 
predict one of the other. Yet they are ex- 
pressions of the same life. The mellow fruit 
which the tree holds out with its hundred hands 
springs from the hard branch and is dependent 
upon it; the same life current flows through 
them both; together they make up the life of 
the tree. The fruit is the fulfillment of the 
branch, its crown and consummation. 
(134) 



SERVICE. 135 

But a universal law of nature has decreed 
that the branch shall be first. Long years the 
young tree stands fruitless while it sends down 
its roots to lay hold of the treasuries of earth, 
and spreads out its branches to gather sunshine 
and rain. Long years it must be cared for and 
protected from injury. And during all this 
time it gives forth no return. It is a law of the 
tree's life that the early years shall be fruitless. 
These years are devoted to preparation, and 
the tree which trespasses against this law and 
begins to bear fruit too early will pay the 
penalty in the failure of ultimate fulfillment. 
Early fruitage means early exhaustion. But 
when the tree has become deep rooted and 
grounded, with strong stock and broad branch, 
it begins to fulfill itself in the bearing of fruit. 
Breadth of branch and depth of root are essen- 
tial to large and continued yield. 

Fruit is a result. It is not a sudden mani- 
festation. It does not appear alone. The farm- 
er does not expect to gather a harvest from 
his sowing overnight. The little child who 
planted the fallen flower, expecting to see it 
blossom at once, knew nothing of the laws of 
life: the mother who nurtured the growing 



136 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

plant knew how flowers are grown. Fruit is 
a natural outcome. A healthy tree in proper 
surroundings will surely bear fruit in due sea- 
son; until that season comes, compulsion will 
only endanger the life of the tree. When the 
time is ripe the fruit appears as naturally as the 
branches and leaves appeared in their season; 
it is an expression of the life of the tree for 
which it had been long preparing in secret. 

The story of the tree is the story of all life. 
The great Teacher once said in a figure, ''first 
the blade, then the ear ; after that, the full corn 
in the ear." The life that would bear the full 
ear of corn must first bring forth .the. blade. 
The man who would attain to his highest pow- 
ers must put off the bearing of fruit. He must 
devote the early years in all earnestness to the 
enriching and widening of jiis resources, to the 
deepening of root and broadening of branch 
against the weight and drain of future fruitage. 

Only the well-rooted life can bear a full har- 
vest. Many a life of promise has failed of 
fulfillment and remained shallow and weak be- 
cause it began to bear fruit too soon. The 
shortsighted parent sends out his child to earn 
wages, and the child remains through all his 



SERVICE. 137 

years immature. Thousands of lives are being 
dwarfed in our land through the ignorance or 
the indolence of parents. And in every dwarfr 
ing, community and country are being robbed 
of the just fruits of full manhood or woman- 
hood. The true parent, looking with provident 
eye to the future years of his child, will shield 
and nurture, even at his own great sacrifice, 
the young life whose destiny has been so largely 
committed to his charge. Instead of asking a 
return, he will give his whole possession, if 
need be, that every opportunity may be used 
for bringing the child into the full possession of 
its powers. With the falling of every year 
there go up out of the homes of our land an 
army of youth, not to become wage earners 
but wage spenders. For four years of college 
life they bring no fruit to the w^orld's market, 
they are consumers. Yet those quiet years, if 
rightly spent, are making root and branch; 
and it is to those very lives that the country will 
look for largest harvest in the years to come. 

Nor is the danger of dwarfing passed with 
the passing of parental care. When the control 
of our lives has come into our own hands, we 
have constantly to guard against sacrificing the 



138 ESSAYS ON J FORK AND LIFE. 

future to the present, against compromising 
ultimate usefulness by passing service. The 
larger the promise of life the greater the dan- 
ger. The young man of marked endowment 
in any community is the man marked for every 
occasion. Demands for service are made upon 
him from all sides. He is called upon to give 
of his time and energy to the various causes 
that appear with every season. He is ex- 
pected to throw himself into every movement 
that aims at the betterment of the community, 
and the more ready his response the more fre- 
quent the call. If in his enthusiasm and desire 
to be of service the young man responds with- 
out stint of time or talent, he may discover 
when it is too late that in the sacrifice of the 
quiet hours of retirement and meditation he 
has robbed his life and forfeited the power to 
serve greatly in the later years. The springs 
run dry at a time when men look to see them 
burst forth like a fountain. If a man does not 
protect the springs of his life, he will not find 
the public inclined to husband them. There is 
a danger line here beyond which self-preser- 
vation becomes selfishness, against which one 
must scrupulously guard; but it is the first duty 



SERVICE. 139 

of every man, at whatever risk of being mis- 
understood, to protect the formative years of 
his Hfe against exhaustion. They are not 
therefore selfish because they are self-centered. 

But there is a selfishness not infrequently 
engendered by the very call to service, the more 
reprehensible because it wears the garb of un- 
selfishness. It springs from fear of public opin- 
ion, and is personified in the man who does not 
dare invoke the passing censure of his fellows 
by declining to serve when he may thereby one 
day serve more greatly — the man who on occa- 
sion gives of the time or money which should 
be devoted to his own improvement, not from 
the prompting of his heart, but under the pres- 
sure of public opinion. That man yields to the 
call not from desire to be of service to his fel- 
lows but from the desire to escape opprobrium 
and to win the good will of the people. Such 
action in politics is stamped demagogy; too 
often in other spheres it is considered public 
spirit. The man who serves with such purpose 
deliberately barters in his own present interest 
the power to enrich his life, and thereby robs 
the community of that benefit which would have 
come to it through the enrichment. He is no 



140 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

less culpable than the guardian who, at the 
whim of the child, squanders the heritage which 
was to fall to his ward with accumulated in- 
terest in after years. That man, though he 
seem philanthropic, is supremely selfish, be- 
cause he has sacrificed upon the altar of his 
own esteem the life that should have been held 
in stewardship. He can have no ground for 
complaint if those whom he claimed to serve 
condemn him when they have looked in vain 
for the harvest of later years. He may remem- 
ber the curse that fell upon the fig tree when 
its promise failed of fulfillment. 

Every man should hold his life in trust for 
others, but as finally responsible for that life 
he must remain the judge as to how it shall be 
made to yield the largest interest. He is never 
justified in giving the direction of it into the 
hands of others. The most unselfish of men, 
and He who finally did the world greatest serv- 
ice, said once, when His friends w^ere urging 
Him to public action: ^'My time Is not yet 
come." Every life has its time of growth and 
its time of harvest. Each man knows best 
where the division lies in his own case between 
these two, knows best the resources and possi- 



SERVICE. 141 

bilities of his life; and he must be guided by 
that knowledge against all influence. His life 
is a stage. The public looks upon it from pit 
and gallery; he sees behind the scenes. They 
may applaud or hiss according to their humor ; 
he cannot play to the galleries, but must stead- 
fastly order his acts in view of the whole of the 
play. That life alone can attain to its greatest 
fruition which has a plan and an ultimate pur- 
pose, and which holds to them through censure 
and applause. 

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves 

Where life and its ventures are laid, 
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves 

May see us in sunshine or shade ; 
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow 
dark, 

We'll trim our broad sail as before, 
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark, 

Nor ask how we look from the shore ! 

"A Christian man is the freest lord of all," 
said Luther, ''and subject to none. A Chris- 
tian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and 
subject to every one;" which is but an echo 
from the great Teacher, "He that is greatest 
among you, let him be as the younger ; and he 
that is chief, as he that doth serve." This is 



142 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

one of the paradoxes of life, the kernel of 
which, when we pierce the shell of contradic- 
tion, is that the aim and end of life is the help- 
ing of others. Service is the fruit of the tree of 
life; the greater the tree the greater the harvest. 
Our confusion and our hurt come from a 
wrong notion of service. It does not call for 
self-abasement. How can a man serve except 
he have power, and how can he gain power by 
humiliation of self before others? We must 
rear as high as possible the pyramid of our ex- 
istence — why else was the base given and placed 
for us? — if we would render the greatest pos- 
sible service. But we may not build, as the 
Pharaohs did of old, monuments to vainglory 
upon the suffering of others. We can never be 
above those we would serve in sympathy; we 
must be above them in power. It is a law of 
nature that things upon the same plane cannot 
help each other. Water will not rise above its 
level. If I would teach, I must know more 
than my pupils. If I would advise, I must be 
wiser than those who seek counsel. If I would 
guide, I must go first and lead others to my 
vantage ground. If I would help, I must be in 
some way stronger than those in need. The 



SERVICE. 143 

frail woman on her couch may help the stalwart 
man if her faith is stronger than his. 

The world's benefit has always come from 
leaders, not followers ; from masters, not slaves. 
Menial servitude is no true service. Slavery 
has ever tended to drag down both master and 
serf. True service comes from above. It 
makes men stronger, not w^eaker; freer, not 
more dependent; nobler, not more base. We 
look upward, not downward, for real service. 
Even the Man of Galilee could not help those 
who looked down upon him. No service can 
come from self-belittlement. The highest place 
is the place of greatest potential, and true men 
seek it, not that they may rule, but serve. 

Service does not demand self-forgetfulness. 
'T am among you as he that serveth," said the 
great Exemplar, and yet, as Dr. Abbott says : 
"He measured himself, and did not heedlessly 
use up his powers in ill-adjusted service. It is 
sometimes said that we ought to forget our- 
selves. Well, that is both true and false. 
Christ did not forget that some care of self Is 
necessary for the largest, truest, and noblest 
self-sacrifice. When with his disciples he had 
come near the city., he did not hesitate to stop, 



144 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

because he was tired, and rest himself, while he 
sent his disciples forward to do the lesser serv- 
ice, to bring back food for their common need. 
He hired a little fishing boat, and used to go 
off and take exercise on the lake for rest. He 
called his disciples to go abroad with him for 
a trip across the lake, that he might hide him- 
self in the wilderness ; when the people followed 
after him, he came back across the sea, and 
went to Phoenicia to seek hiding in that for- 
eign province; when he could not be hid there, 
he went up into the northern mountains, that 
he might there find rest, and in rest strength 
for new work. No; love is not always self- 
forgetfulness." 

When the man has realized that life is not 
for self, but for service, he has reached at once 
the highest and truest view of life. Service 
Is as natural and essential, to the real man as 
fruit-bearing is to the tree. To bear fruit too 
early means sacrifice, but not to bear fruit in 
the proper season means death. 

For I say, this is death and the sole death, 
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, 
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, 
And lack of love from love made manifest ; 
A lamp's death when, replete with oil, it chokes. 



SERVICE. 145 

Who has not seen men of weahh and rich 
endowments perish away in aU their higher 
nature because they refused to put forth their 
stored-up power in the fruits of service ? Serv- 
ice is not merely a privilege; it is a necessity. 
John Wesley's words, ''I make all I can, I save 
all I can, I give all I can,'' are appHcable not 
only to the getting and giving of money but 
to the getting and giving of life. The ability 
to take the third step depends upon having 
taken the other two; but these taken, the third 
must be, or life turns in upon itself and fails. 

He who v^^ould be a faithful servant must 
take constant thought of self. It is the invested 
capital from which his fellows are to draw in- 
terest, and he wnll not allow it to be drafted 
upon, lest the interest fail; he will not neglect 
to declare dividends in due season, lest the in- 
vestment be worthless. He will keep a most 
vigilant eye upon himself ; at first, that his life 
be not given too freely; at last, that it be not 
withheld. There are two dangers, to one or the 
other of which eyery life is exposed. The one 
is exhaustion; the other, suppression. After 
the full measure of fruitless years must come 
the full harvest. 
10 



XIII. The Ideal. 

All men, in fact, whether or not they know it, 
have an ideal, base or lofty, which molds charac- 
ter and shapes destiny. , . . The ideal, that 
which in our inmost souls we love and desire, 
which we lay to heart and live by, is at once the 
truest expression of our nature and the most po- 
tent agency in developing its powers. . . . All 
important, therefore, is the choice of an ideal ; for 
this more than rules or precepts will determine 
what we are to become. — Bishop Spalding. 

The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, 
was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in 
this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, 
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere 
is thy Ideal : work it out therefrom, and working, 
believe, live, be free. Fool ! the Ideal is in thy- 
self, the impediment, too, is in thyself : thy Con- 
dition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same 
Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be 
of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be 
heroic, be poetic? — Carlyle. 

Time Is past, present, and future; but life is 

only present. Only in the Now the woof is 

weaving. Out of the future into the past fiows 

the stream of life, over the narrow edge of the 

(T46) 



THE IDEAL. 147 

present; but on that line alone lies life. Our 
dreams and ideals drift down from out the mist- 
veiled future. Crossing the line of to-day, they 
feel for an instant the touch of life, become 
reality, and sweep on fixed forever into the past. 

There is no life nor power in that which is 
gone. Alexander and Caesar and Saint Francis 
and Luther have lived and finished their lives. 
The annals of time are shelves filled with vases 
that have received the stamp of the potter's 
wheel and been set aside. They cannot return 
to the wheel. The past is dependent on the 
living present for the part it plays in the mold- 
ing to-day. The stories of hero and martyr 
must make us more valiant and steadfast in 
our own struggle, or they have no place in 
our lives. The lessons of history must make 
us wiser in the solution of our own problems, 
or our knowledge of them is vain. As we stand 
at the whirling wheel of life we look upon the 
finished vases and learn by their flaws or their 
fineness to give to our own a noble form. 

The hopes and the ideals of the future, too, 
to which we look forward, must give us en- 
couragement for the work of the present hour, 
or they are futile. History and hope can enter 



148 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

into the world's life only as they are inter- 
preted into the deeds of the living hour. The 
past and the future are focused upon the Now. 
All power is present. 

Life is a growth, not by butterfly transfor- 
mations, but by slowly widening circles. The 
first figure ever used to picture life was that of 
a tree — the tree of life. It is a beautiful thought 
that life has its root and its branches, that it 
puts forth leaves of beauty and bears fruit of 
usefulness, that it is the child of earth and 
heaven, that it grows downward and upward 
and outward. Our ancient forefathers, wan- 
dering under the oaks of primeval forest, saw 
the likeness of life to the tree, and gave ex- 
pression to the figure in their mythology, where 
Ygdrasil is the tree of existence, whose root 
reaches down to the depth, whose crown 
touches heaven, whose branches fill the uni- 
verse. 

A faithful figure of life, too, is the tree, be- 
cause its days are an endless round. The cur- 
rent of sap flows up from root to branch, where 
it bursts forth in foliage and fruit, which in 
due season fall back to earth to be changed to 
mold and sap and leaf and fruit again. 



THE IDEAL. i49 

Upon this endless round of activities depends 
the tree's existence. It must work, not only to 
bring forth an ephemeral harvest of leaves, but 
to preserve and expand its life. The leaves are 
a manifestation and a condition of life, but the 
life of the tree is not in them, nor do they ulti- 
mately measure its growth. Around the tree 
there extends, just under the bark, a tiny band. 
It is neither wood nor bark, but it is becommg 
wood, and when the year's round of activity is 
done it will be a circle, the largest of the tree. 
There, in that becoming, is the permanent gam 
of the tree, the measure of its growth. Year 
by year, as fruit and foliage come to maturity 
and fall away to be taken up again into new 
life, the successive circles are folded into the 
heart of the oak. 

But as each circle is realized in wood the 
vitality ebbs out of that ring. The perfected 
circles form the strength of the tree, but they 
do not hold its vitality. Not in the heart of 
the oak, but in the forming, outmost band, 
abides the mystery we call life. And there it 
works, not to bring forth leaves nor fruit, but 
to produce a tree. There, in that incomplete- 
ness, hovers the Ideal, there hides the power 



150 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

which is working towar'd the perfect form. No 
fear that its work may turn out a vine or a 
bramble. The unseen power wiU be true to its 
Ideal, whatever the circumstance of earth or 
air. It will bring forth a tree after its own 
kind. Leaves and fruit will pass; the bark, 
too, will burst and be cast away. But through 
all the changes of the ever-recurring round the 
tree will be steadfastly realizing the Ideal which 
it set for itself in the beginning. So long as it 
has its Ideal, so long as it has the forming circle, 
it has life. When it ceases to have that, be 
the tree never so great, it is dead. And men 
read the story of the tree's life, its vicissitudes, 
the droughts and fair seasons, not in the for- 
gotten harvests but in the rings of the oak. 

And life is a tree. We draw our sustenance 
from the stores of earth and sky. Our roots 
are deep sunk in the soil of circumstance; our 
heads are lifted to catch the blessings of 
heaven; our branches are spread out to the 
winds of the world. The universe is made to 
serve our need. We put forth leaves and bear 
fruit — the manifestation of life, our deeds. 
They are gathered by others ; we take them up 
again into our own larger life; they are for- 



THE IDEAL. ^5^ 

gotten. Not in them is found the true measure 
of our gain and growth. We cast away our 
ba:rk— the creeds and fancies that protected 
earUer years become too- binding as Hfe ex- 
pands. Deeds and creeds must pass if the. span 
of hfe would lengthen. 

We grow by widening circles, by horizons 
ever changing, ever dim. 'There is no outside., 
no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. 
No sooner is one horizon realized than another 
takes its place, dim and indistinct as before. 
What was once vague and meaningless becomes 
clear and full of meaning with the passing 
years; and with succeeding cycles things once 
not so much as dreamed of become matter of 
fact, part of ourselves, like the rings in the 
heart of the oak. Books that had no charm to 
our youthful minds teem with truth in the later 
years, because our horizons have meantime 
widened by experience of these very truths. 
And ''the books which once we valued more 
than the apple of the eye, we have quite ex- 
hausted. What is that but saying that we have 
come up with the point of view which the uni- 
versal mind took through the eyes of one scribe ; 
we have been that man and passed on?" So 



152 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

we pass from primer to philosophy, from 
"Romeo and JuHet" to "The Tempest," from 
the law of the Old Testament to the life of the 
New. But, however far we go, there yet re- 
mains before us "An Undiscovered Island," a 
"Revelation/' 

I am a part of all that I have met ; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravel'd world, whose margin fades 

Forever and forever when I move. 

We Speak of ideas coming to us as if they 
were a settling swarm of bees. But ideas, like 
the stars, are fixed in the infinite spaces, and, 
though to our feeble eye they may sometimes 
blend in a milky way afar, we shall find, when 
we reach them, measureless spaces between. 
In the world of ideas no telescope will bring 
the bright orb within reach ; if we would realize 
it, we must go, or grow, to it. So in widening 
circles we pass from knowledge to knowledge, 
from life to life. And our limit, like that of 
the universe, is found in the Infinite. 

The broadest view has its blending of earth 
and sky. The largest life has its mist-veiled 
horizon. And in that horizon rim hovers the 
genius, the Ideal, of life, molding and shaping 



THE WEAL. 153 

Our destiny. Like the mirage, it leads but ever 
eludes us. No sooner do we come where it 
seemed to dwell than we find it beckonino^ to us 
from the horizon as before. We struggle 
toward it, but, like the rainbow, it is always just 
beyond. We advance, we gain ground, we 
gain all except the Ideal, that can never be 
won. What I set before me to-day as the thing 
to be most desired becomes the veriest com- 
monplace with its attainment to-morrow, not 
because it is less but because I am more. My 
horizon has moved outward with the very ef- 
fort, my Ideal is now beyond. Michael Angelo 
often let the chisel fall from his w^ork as it 
neared completion, and left it unfinished not 
because the work had failed but because the 
Ideal which he was pursuing with tireless hand, 
and which he had seen in the work, fled as he 
strove to chisel it into reality, and left the work 
commonplace in his eye. The Ideal cannot 
abide in the Real, else there were an end to life. 
The Ideal is the formative power in life. It 
is that which guides and shapes, which in- 
spires and sustains. No man can have It and 
not strive. No man can strive in any true sense 
without It. It Is the motive In every man's 



154 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

work, however obscurely he may feel it in the 
hours of toil. Ever and anon he lifts his eye, 
like the sculptor, from the work where his 
chisel rests to the model which he has set be- 
fore him. And the difference between the work 
and the model, the distance between the worker 
and his Ideal, is at once the measure of his 
incompleteness and the motive to further toil. 
The man for whom there hovers on the far 
horizon no beckoning Ideal, who has reached 
the bourn of his life, who ceases to strive, is 
like the sapless tree, dead, though he tower 
never so high. 

Men become like that which they constantly 
look upon. Faces that have reflected each other 
in emulation for half a century become won- 
drously alike. The great apostle knew the 
power of this reflected image when he wrote 
to the wayward young converts at Corinth, 
"We all, with open face beholding as in a glass 
the glory of the Lord, are changed into the 
same image from glory to glory." He knew 
that if he could get them to look steadfastly, 
"with open face," upon the perfect Ideal, it 
would be well with them. 



THE IDEAL. 155 

And this mysterious influence of reflected 
light is at work in every h£e. We are changed 
into the image of the Ideal which we set before 
us— ennobled if it be worthy, debased if it be 
unworthy. Every day may be seen around us 
the manifestation of this great truth — faces that 
have become fine and noble from reflecting a 
high Ideal, and other faces that have become 
coarse and mean from being set toward a low 
Ideal. 

We may choose whatever Ideal we will, but, 
once it is chosen^ we cannot but grow more 
and more like that which we have set before 
us. To-day's Ideal will inevitably mold to- 
morrow's character, for character grows into 
the form outlived by the Ideal. Every circle 
from which our Ideal takes flight becomes an 
outpost of character. So in the working out 
of our Ideal we work it into ourselves. And 
this is the imperishable in the growth of the 
tree of life. 



XIV. The Unconscious Attainment. 

Not what I may remember constitutes educa- 
tion, but what I cannot forget. — Qumtilian. 

Our age is preeminently one of education- 
al aspiration. The quickening that has taken 
place in this direction within the past half cen- 
tury is altogether unparalleled. Campaigns 
for education and twentieth century funds and 
thank offerings are a feature of the new times. 
Church and State have been awakened to larger 
effort In the interest of their schools. Within 
a single year more than a hundred million dol- 
lars have been given to the cause of education 
in our country. 

And In response, as it were, to this Interest 
and liberality there are thousands of young men 
and women coming every year to take advan- 
tage of the great opportunity. They are com- 
ing from town and country, from shop and 
plow. Some are leaving positions which it 
has taken years to win; others are coming at 
the sacrifice by parents of all but the bare neces- 

(156) 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. 157 

sities of life. On all sides they are turning 
toward the open door of the school, their faces 
set upon the far-off goal of education. It is 
an inspiring sight, this army of our youth, the 
future stay of our nation, willing to strive and 
sacrifice for that which they believe to be the 
highest. It is an even more inspiring sight — 
the fathers and mothers who are toiling in 
obscure homes with no other end in view than 
that their children may enjoy a larger life than 
theirs. 

It will be the real tragedy of life if these 
parents fail to find in their returning sons and 
daughters that for which they have labored 
so many years. It will be deepest pathos if 
these young men and women discover in the 
fierce battle of life that what they got at school 
does not stand them in stead in the time of 
need. Beside such a calamity the fate of the 
fabled children of Hamelin would pale into 
insignificance. The expectant throng that are 
marching out from their homes will never 
return the same children that went forth. 
Whether they come to the pleasant sight of 

a Joyous land, 
Joining the town and Just at hand, 



158 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew, 
And flowers put on a fairer hue, 
And everything was strange and new; 

whether they realize their bright hopes, or are 
left to wander in darkness, will depend upon 
whether they are given by those at whose pip- 
ing they march a right conception of their aim. 

Is the common conception of education a true 
one? Ask the man of the market place what 
the college is for, and his idea is more than 
likely that it stands for things far off from his 
life, for foreign language and high mathemat- 
ics and recondite science. Ask any one of 
those who are coming up to college what he 
expects to get there, and his mind is filled with 
vague ideas of branches of study, which 
will change him somehow or other into that 
unknown quantity to which he refers as an 
educated man. He looks forward to a di- 
ploma, which shall stand for more or less in- 
formation in the various studies of the college 
course. 

Is that the true notion of education? Shall 
our youth be led to believe that it is for such 
results the country is taxing itself and men are 
opening their purses and parents are spending 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENl. 159 

their lives? The student who merely swells 
his mind with accumulations of knowledge is 
as far from maturity as the child with enlarged 
head is far from the developed man. Surely 
education is not so separate from life. 

What, then, is the true meaning of educa- 
tion? Such a question is too deep to be an- 
swered at a stroke of the pen, but we may at 
least get in the way to an answer by clearing 
our minds of what education is not. First of 
all, it is not learning. No knowledge of any- 
thing or number of things, however thorough 
and minute, can ever in itself be education ; as 
no heap of earth, though piled mountain-high, 
can ever become a tree. Education is not ac- 
quisition. It is not a possession which is carried 
about as one carries his apparel. It is not 
what we learn in books. It is not what we learn 
in the task. Do we send our children to school 
simply, or even primarily, to learn the three 
R's? How Httle of life is spent with pen or 
book in hand ! Are the influences and benefits 
of school days to be restricted to that little frac- 
tion of life, and do they play no part in the 
great hours upon the street and in companion- 
ship and in solitude? 



j6o essays on work AND LIFE. 

No, no; learning is one thing, education is 
another, dependent upon each other though they 
be. What we get in our books and in our tasks 
is learning; what we get through them is edu- 
cation. We may forget our learning. What 
man is there in the whirling stream of life who 
has not forgotten the fpreign language and 
higher mathematics of college days? These 
are excellent means to education, and are not 
to be lightly esteemed, as gymnastic exercise is 
an excellent means to bodily vigor. But it is 
strength of body, and not gymnastic drill, which 
serves the man in every circumstance of life. 
There is many a place where a knowledge of 
foreign language or science or higher mathe- 
matics is of so little use that the man forgets 
all he knew of them. But the strength of pur- 
pose and the larger view and the finer feeling 
which may come, and sometimes come only, 
through the study of these things play their 
part in every contingency of the life which has 
them. The learning of the college course will 
lead to education if followed aright. We climb 
upward, not to get nearer the stars, but to see 
more of earth. 

Education includes, to be sure, the strength- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. i6i 

ening of memory as one of its first essentials — 
every factory must have its storeroom — but it 
means, too, the quickening of imagination and 
the sharpening of thought. It means larger 
understanding of the life about us, larger inter- 
ests, larger sympathies. It means the broaden- 
ing of the highways of sense and sentiment that 
lead from us to the world, so that we shall see 
more and hear more and feel more wherever we 
are. Education is life measured in terms of ca- 
pacity and power. In the words of Bishop 
Huntington to teachers : "You want to rear 
men fit and ready for all spots and crises, 
prompt and busy in affairs, gentle among little 
children, self-reliant in danger, genial in com- 
pany, sharp in a jury box, tenacious at a town 
meeting, unseducible in a crowd, tender at a 
sick bed, not likely to jump into the first boat 
at a shipwreck, affectionate and respectful at 
home, obliging in a traveling party, shrewd and 
just in the market, reverent and punctual at the 
church, brave in action, patient in suffering, be- 
lieving and cheerful everywhere, perfect in 
spirit, seeing the Lord. This is the manhood 
that our age and country are asking of its edu- 
cators — well-built and vital, manifold and har- 



i62 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

monious, full of wisdom, full of energy, full 
of faith." 

Whatever falls short of that attainment falls 
short of education. Whatever helps toward 
that goal, whether it come at books or at the 
plow-tail, is a means to education. Knowledge 
is simply food, and the only possible advantage 
which the school can have over the farm or 
factory is the advantage of more nutritious 
food, better prepared and served with more 
regularity and judgment. But the food must 
lose its identity by assimilation before it can 
become education. The man's education, there- 
fore, like the development of his body, depends 
upon two things : the kind of food and the 
power of assimilation. So it happens some- 
times that the boy who comes home with a 
diploma is less educated than the boy who has 
remained at the plow, and the child upon whom 
the care and hopes of the home were lavished 
is outstripped in the long race of life by the 
child of little promise. There is no peculiar 
virtue in any course of study which will in- 
evitably make the knowledge of that course 
education. The virtue must be in the man. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. 163 

No school can guarantee to every one of its 
students an education. There will always be 
weaklings, to whom no prescribed course of 
food can give strength. 

And yet our youth are amply justified in 
giving up the plow and the shop for the school. 
The young man, forsaking a work planned for 
the making of money, finds here a work planned 
for the making of men. Centuries of experi- 
ment have selected certain fields of knowledge 
as furnishing highly nutritious food. The stu- 
dent feeds day after day in these various fields, 
gathering facts and formulae, song and story. 
If he have temperate habits and the power of 
assimilation, he will feel ere long a new 
strength rising within him, and giving as it 
rises a widening reach to all his faculties, sus- 
taining and inspiring him in his daily work, 
opening ever new discoveries in the erst prosaic 
task, revealing unsuspected significance in his 
studies and the world about him. 
* In the possession of this new strength and 
vision, he will see, through the symbolic figures 
and formulae of mathematics, the changeless 
principles of the physical world for which they 
stand — the living forces that govern the star 



164 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

and the falling stone, and form the straight- 
edge for material truth. He will feel some- 
thing of that fine frenzy which possessed the 
staid old scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, when, 
after months of toil with formulae, he was so 
overcome by the light of celestial truth which 
shone through the figures that he had to yield 
all further calculation to other hands. 

To such a student, laboring in the fields of 
science, the work will be no longer a matter of 
mere symbols and retorts and test tubes; for 
by these means the laws of the laboratory will 
have been resolved for him into the princi- 
ples that flow through every material thing. 
Through them he will see into the remotest 
confines of the universe, beholding how the 
laws that govern his passing experiment oper- 
ate in the atmosphere of the sun and in the 
fire of the farthest fixed stars, learning through 
the erstwhile tedious study the awe-inspiring 
truth that he cannot dip into the most common- 
place things about him without dealing with 
universal principles. 

Passing through the pages of history, such 
a man will find the new light fall upon the once 
cold facts and dates, fusing them by its dis- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. 165 

solving power into a throbbing record of hu- 
man Hfe, whose latest pulsations he feels round 
about him and within him. Turning the classic 
page, it is no longer Latin and Greek he sees, 
but the Latins and the Greeks. Behind the 
printed page he has discovered these ancient 
peoples, with their loves and passions and all 
the influences that entered into their wealth of 
life. He becomes for the time a citizen of those 
far-off ages. He is swayed by Cicero's burning 
eloquence; he walks with Horace or Virgil 
through Elysian fields of poesy ; he falls into the 
triumphal entry of the returning conqueror as 
it sweeps into the Eternal City. For the while 
he is a Roman, swayed by all that moved a 
Roman heart. Or if it be a page from classic 
Hellas before him, he is no longer a citizen of 
the new century, but a Greek of the olden time, 
listening to the murmuring reeds of unseen Pan 
while Fauns and Satyrs frisk among the trees, 
watching Diana and her nymphs sweep in the 
storm of chase across the cloud-flecked sky of 
night, fighting with Achilles before the walls of 
Troy, or shouting with the Athenians under 
Demosthenes's words, **Let us fight Philip." 
Thus new worlds in time and space may be 



1 66 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

opened to the student through his college course. 
These are the things which should come 
through books, and without which in some ap- 
preciable degree the student may not be con- 
tent — the larger vision, the finer feeling; the 
freedom of the kingdom of the natural world, 
the citizenship of all ages and all peoples. If 
he bring back from these fields a larger under- 
standing and a broader sympathy with the life 
about him, they have been his education. Only 
as deep answers unto deep, the life within to the 
life without, can he justly claim that the way 
of the tree of knowledge has been to him the 
way of the tree of life. 

The man who wins from his labors, in school 
or in shop or field, the groundwork of regu- 
larity and perseverance and thoroughness in 
the performance of every duty, and who adds 
to these acquirements larger interests and 
higher aspirations and finer sentiments, deeper 
sympathies and broader tolerance, that man 
may count himself as having made no mean 
progress on the road of education. 

And these things cannot be forgotten. The 
steps by which he accomplished the attain- 
ment may grow dim with the lapse of time, as 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. 167 

the way on the mountain side fades into the 
haze of distance beneath the chmber, but the 
attainment is a part of himself. DiHgence, per- 
severance, understanding, tolerance, aspiration, 
sentiments, sympathies — these things cannot be 
forgotten, for they are not held in the uncertain 
fold of memory, but are bone and blood of the 
man. They are vital forces in every act of 
life. The boy may count his apples to see if 
any of them are lost; he never counts his fin- 
gers. Not what a man may remember, but 
what he cannot forget, constitutes education. 

All education is unconscious attainment. 
We cannot by taking thought add one cubit 
to our stature. The mysterious processes by 
which food becomes physical life and knowl- 
edge is transformed into intellectual life are 
beyond our control. We can only set the 
causes in operation and leave the result to be 
wrought out. We cannot get education by di- 
rectly striving after it, nor can we get it by 
congested effort. The man who hopes to get 
education by cramming into one week what 
ought to be spread over several months is as 
uHAvise as the man who would eat a week's 



i68 ESSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

rations at a sitting, expecting to be strength- 
ened proportionately. Education, like physical 
strength, comes to us unwittingly as we go 
about our daily tasks. And it comes to us 
slowly. The processes which change conscious 
acquisition into unconscious attainment are so 
deliberate that our knowledge always far out- 
runs our education in every field. What 
shadowy horizons we carry about with us 
daily, horizons of knowledge that shall some 
day be education, when they have become a 
part of ourselves. 

Everywhere in life the process is going on — 
what men know becoming what they are. In 
the home, in business, in society, in the broad 
relationships of life, the change is secretly tak- 
ing place. We know more politeness than we 
manifest in the forgetfulness of the social hour. 
The merchant knows more honesty than he 
practices in the absorbing moment of the sale. 
We could be more tender than we are in the 
unexpected turns of home life. When we shall 
have become instinctively upright and thought- 
ful, it will be impossible any more to forget. 
The consummation of all knowledge is uncon- 
scious attainment. The ideal man Is not he 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ATTAINMENT. 169 

who, in the conscious presence of the law or 
custom, fulfills its requirements, but he who 
fulfills them unconsciously because they are 
v/ritten in his heart. 

Unconscious attainment, the realization of 
one's self, is the ^oal of life, and toward that 
end all else must serve. The hours of toil and 
the hours of rest, the days of drudgery and the 
days of delight, the seasons of society and 
the seasons of solitude — all must make ulti- 
mately for the enriching of the life into which 
they fall. Their measure must finally be in 
terms of the man. They pass, but he remains. 
Men are the supreme product of the world. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 
That metaphor ! and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 
Thou, to whom fools propound, 
When the wine makes its round, 
"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, 
seize to-day !" 

Fool! All that is, at all. 
Lasts ever, past .recall ; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 
What entered into thee, 
That was, is, and shall be : 

Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay 
endure. 



170 BSSAYS ON WORK AND LIFE. 

He fixed thee 'mid this dance 

Of plasitic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent. 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 



FEB 4 1905 



